What the End of Supplemental Means to You
The end of Google’s supplemental index means webmasters have one less tool to help determine overall site quality (in Google’s eyes). This “tool” was essentially rendered useless months ago when the green label disappeared from the SERPs, but many found different ways to get at the same data. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I suspect some data that I shared last month was indicative of the supplemental index. To wit:
On November 8, I reported some staggering drops in “pages indexed” by Google for many high-profile web sites.
Today, Google announced that the supplemental index is gone.
Result? Look at these major increases in the visible pages indexed returned on a site: query:
site:citysearch.com
November 8, 2007: 759,000 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 35,800,000 ” ”
Question: Does this mean that 98% of CitySearch.com was labeled “supplemental”?
site:amazon.com
November 8, 2007: 8,640,000 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 40,100,000 ” ”
Does this mean 82% of Amazon.com was supplemental?
site:walmart.com
November 8, 2007: 85,800 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 2,150,000 ” ”
96% of WalMart.com?
site:yelp.com
November 8, 2007: 307,000 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 832,000 ” ”
73% of Yelp.com?
site:smartbargains.com
November 8, 2007: 10,600 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 12,100 ” ”
site:overstock.com
November 8, 2007: 166,000 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 1,900,000 ” ”
site:target.com
November 8, 2007: 106,000 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 940,000 pages indexed
Google has added some quality signal tools to Webmaster Central, but nothing like what the data above seems to reveal about the overall health of these sites.