Supplemental Results Revisited

Happily, it appears, at least for now, the duplicate content generated by totalunlock.co.uk’s proxy has been de-indexed…

Not so happily for many, the supplemental tag has been removed from search results. This means we will no longer be able to identify which pages Google considers of less importance.. and subsequently optimise those problem pages.

This is especially annoying as often the pages in supplemental results are the most relevant ones; it will now be a trickier and more blind effort to optimise.

The article author mentions, “These [supplemental results] are often pages with lower PageRank or those with more complex URLs.” While it can be agreed the “lower PageRank” statement is true (pr0 pages?), the “complex URLs” claim is ridiculous. Is Google stating that anything more than domain.com/category/ (or domain.com/page.php) is complex?? If this is the case, it’s laughable. “domain.com/category/page.php” is still just as simple and many pages which were marked as “supplementa” certainly did not have complex urls. I would call “domain.com/page.php?blah=whatever;whatever=blah;sid=34745854854895487″ complex (for a human to remember and re-enter in a browser), but I wonder what Google considers complex.

Basically, this is also a bad move for Google… it helps keep the rubbish in their main index and valuable resources in their supplemental results index. Way to go Google.