Update: Google is removing the supplemental query

Google’s Matt Cutts has weighed in on the discussion last week about the unofficial “show your supplemental results in Google” query, and seems to be confirming that the query won’t work much longer.

Background: I posted last week about the query being broken, and Rand picked up and expanded on the news on SEOmoz.

Today, Matt C. weighed in with a comment on SEOmoz, saying “it’s good to remove this query”:

I don’t want people to get fixated on Supplemental Results and focus on them to the exclusion of other aspects of SEO. We saw that happen with the toolbar PageRank bar and ended up slowing the update rate on the visible toolbar PageRank to every 3-4 months so that people didn’t spend too much of their time concentrating on PageRank and less on other parts of good SEO.

Matt goes on to say supplemental results are becoming “less and less supplemental” and “more likely to show up for any given query.” My searching experience hasn’t yet confirmed that to be the case, but we’ll see.

I’m still of the same opinion as Rand — namely, that the ability to see supplemental results should be a tool in Webmaster Central. Not so I can get “fixated” on supplemental results, but so I can use it to identify any potential crawling/linking/site structure issues with my clients’ sites.