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minstrel · #9 (**permalink**) 09-18-2007, 06:24 PM

Matt Cutts: Supplemental vs. Duplicate Content

Quote:

I'd agree with most of your video and your bullet points, but lean more toward Michael's viewpoint on bullet point #2; duplicate content doesn't make you more likely to have pages in the supplemental index in my experience. It could be a symptom but not a cause, e.g. lots of duplicate content implies lots of pages, and potentially less PageRank for each of those pages. So trying to surface an entire large catalog of pages would mean less PageRank for each page, which could lead to those pages being less likely to be included in our main web index. I'm not aware of an explicit mechanism whereby duplicate content is more likely to be in our supplemental results, but I'm also happy to admit that as supplemental results are different from webspam, I'm not the expert at Google on every aspect of supplemental results.

One fine point to make: when people see the "show duplicate results" link at the end of search results and click it to add "&filter=0" as an extra parameter, the new results you see are not all from the supplemental results. Lemme see if I can find a query to demonstrate that. Ah, here we are, the first one I tried. [site:mattcutts.com foxmarks] returns one result. If I click to see more results, that post has also been indexed at other urls, but at least two of the extra urls are in our main web index, not the supplemental index.

Infrastructure status, January 2007
Matt Cutts
January 10, 2007

Quote:

As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).

I think going forward, you’ll continue to see the supplemental results get even fresher, and website owners may see more traffic from their supplemental results pages. To check out the current freshness of the supplemental results, I grabbed 20 supplemental pages from my site and checked out their crawl date using the “cache:” command and looking in the cached page header. The oldest supplemental results page that I saw was from September 7th, 2006 (and I only saw 2-3 pages from September; most were from December or November). The most recent of the 20 pages was from January 7, 2007, which shows that supplemental results can be quite fresh at this point.