Google used to have a supplementary index where it would list lower quality pages and pages that could be duplicate content. This was called the supplemental index and it gave SEO’s fits for years. In the summer of 2007 Google abandoned the Supplemental Index and officially states that supplemental results no longer exist.
While visiting the Googleplex for the search engine strategies conference in San Jose I spoke with a Google engineer who said this about the supplemental index: “We took that dog out back and shot it.”
So now the SEO industry has no easy way to see our pages which have been flagged as second tier, duplicate content, or pages without enough links to appear in the regular index.
Here are 2 searches you can perform to replicate supplemental results:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adomain&filter=0 Finds the total number of pages indexed by Google from your website with
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adomain +-inallurl%3Adomain&filter=0 Finds the total number of pages in the main index
Francesco Mapelli has made a cool tool that semi-automates this process. Find your supplemental pages here.
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We used a blog network and ping services to launch our website from nowhere to the top 10 in our industry.
The supplemental index is a relic of SEO ghosts of the past.