Google’s Supplemental Index

In the good old days Google only had one index. Its main index. But as the internet has grown Google needs to find ways to still continue to provide results quickly. And this is where the supplemental index came along.

It’s mainly based around PR (page rank) - if you have thousands of low ranking pages - page ranking that is, then these will likely be dumped into the supplimentary index. It’s a secondary place and your results *can* be shown in the SERPS but these results are always behind other sites with better PR.

So those who say PR doesn’t matter are lying - even Google engineer Matt Cutts has confirmed this. Other pages that can go into supplemental hell are duplicate content pages - I have seen Wordpress sites (such as this one) go off into one because of the way the page names are structured in the same way or duplicate of index files (which is what happened here).

So how do you get out of the supplemental index? Simple really - get better PR to those pages that are in the index. Don’t just get PR into your index page either - have a go at getting what is termed “deep linking” - that is links pointing to any other page than your index ! simply really
 

Alternatively delete some of your pages. Sounds drastic ? But if you have a 40 thousand page site and 20 thousand of those pages are junk just to try and get adsense into your site and only get 1 or 2 visitors between them all then it’s time to get rid of them.

Delete them from your robots.txt files - Google will soon pick these up and delete them from their index. Then your PR will not flow to these pages and thus the pages left in your site will be boosted by what’s left.