Supplemental Results Go Bye-Bye

As Matt Cutts has been hinting at for a while, Google has now dumped the supplemental results tag from the SERPS. Now it does not mean that the SI no longer exists, it just means that the results will look no different when you do a site:domain or regular search. Matt has been hinting at this for a while and it has finally happened. Google reps, including Matt, have been telling is that the SI is not a penalty and is crawled and refreshed more often. The fact remains that it is still crawled less than the regular index and the pages within the SI are less likely to show up in searches. It is my hope that they are able to bring the SI into the regular index but I don't see that happening for a while.

From what I have read from Matt, one of the biggest reasons they removed this tag had to do with too many SEO's and Webmasters concentrating on getting pages out of the SI instead of more comprehensive SEO work. After spending a lot of time on various SEO forums I can agree with that but if that is the case why don't they do away with the toolbar Page Rank. After all that is a bigger issue and has helped develop a huge amount of link schemes and link spam. I have a few pages in the SI but for the most part they are pages that are not that important so I don't bother with them that much. What about sites that have a majority of their pages stuck there? It is going to take a bit more work for them to be identified so they can get them in the regular index.

Apparently there is still a way to find supplemental results. Jaan Kanellis has a post on his blog explaining the query to use to find supplemental pages here. I am willing to bet that Google will add some functionality to Webmaster Tools that will allow webmasters to find their supplemental results but we will have to wait and see. If Google is really worried about clearing up issues that result in improper SEO they really need to get rid of the PR toolbar and hopefully they will. Again we will have to wait and see.

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