A Little Confused About Supplemental Results

[ericbramlett]

I'm a little confused about supplemental results. If you run a site:www.onesourcemetro.com search you'll see that pretty much all my pages but 2 show up as supplemental results. Granted, 50 of these are recip link pages, and probably deserve to be there.

However..........there's 40 odd pages that are showing up as supplemental results - and these pages are ranking page 1 for their targeted keywords (mostly condo developments.)

So...what gives? What's the real fear behind supplemental results? You know that Google has cached them, knows about them, and even ranks them.

[VRI]

The supplemental pages are pulled out for the results when there aren't enough pages in the main index for a specific term. You'll see them popping up for stuff but I doubt you'll see them for any reasonably comptetitive terms.

[webmaster]

Omitted results does not equal supplemental results

I think there is some confusion here - using the site command does not return all of your pages initially but it does not mean anything you don't see without having to click "Omitted results" is supplemental results. You have run a site query and it is only showing you a few pages because the majority of your pages are on the same topic and might be to similar for what you are looking for. It is not the same as "supplemental results" Now granted you do a few "supplemental results" but just because you only have a few results returned doing an initial site: query does not mean anything you don't see without having to click repeat with omitted pages.

Those that are actually supplemental results will be llabelled so.

Here are 2 example pages returned after clicking "repeat with omitted results" one is supplemental and one is not.

[webmaster]

Ahahhahaah I need to fix that screenshot

[webmaster]

Ok fixed, now let me address this

After clicking "Repeat with omitted results" I am presented with the true count of pages Google is aware of from your site.

In green I have circled a page that is NOT a supplement result, and in Red I circled one that is.

I also included a couple of pages that are incompletely cached. (This is because they are framed pages without a unique title, description etc) - you can optimize iframes to rank properly as well, but this is a completely different topic and please leave it for another thread

[webmaster]

Oh btw - let me address the behavior of Google's site command only returning a few results - the behavior I have observed is that Google's site command initially attempts to return "Types" of pages within your domain, and usually only returns one page for each "Type" - the rest it places in Omitted results. There are many reason Google would want to do this - ease of access and categorization would be at the top of my list, next might be conservation of resources, why run a more complicated query than you need to.

Anyways - I tested this out when discussing this same issue with Bob Crain the other day. I took the most web savvy website I know (Besides mine of course becaues that would be biased) and I ran a site: query.

Which domain did I choose? www.webmasterworld.com I run a query and I get (That's right a whopping 350 results) - does that mean that webmaster world only has 350 cached pages? absolutely not - it means that Google found 350 distinct "types" of pages within WMW - Click the ommitted results link and you get over 300k

[webmaster]

So does that clear it up for everyone? Just because you do not see all of your pages listed right away in a site: command, does not mean all of the other pages are in supplemental results - it just means there is one more step to view all of your pages

[ericbramlett]

Morgan -

Thanks a ton. You were dead-on in my assumption that "ommitted results" were supplemental results. This cleared things up completely.

[webmaster]

Glad I could be of help

[webmaster]

Just a note, to see what I was talking about you need to have your search preferences set to 100 listings per google results page