Hi MJ

Thanks for the notification on this, good topic.

The Matt Cutts wording "I think going forward, you’ll continue to see the supplemental results get even fresher." was surely a Google hint. Unless many rational people are misreading their figures, a higher percentage of pages have recently hit the supplemental, regardless of other issues. I'm less sure about the "website owners may see more traffic from their supplemental results pages." I take your point about long tail searches but have been struggling lately to see many of these work, on quite a few sites.

In truth , I do not actually know whether calling up supplemental pages has become harder, just an impression. If anyone has recently collected specific data on this, that would be helpful. Particularly if that could be compared to historic information.

Must confess, I do prefer real data to impressions where possible and by coincidence, am currently running an experiment on getting pages out of the supplemental, with the kind help of a friend's site. We created a few pages at various levels of crudiness, knowing they'd go supplemental and have recently begun specific but different changes to each. Content, internal linking, IBLs etc. to see which is effective and with what speed.

However well you monitor site data, still hard to give exact opinion on which of many aspects were the telling factor but we'll hopefully get close. Should any clear information come out of this, I'll post an outline if that's of interest.