Old School vs. Web2.0 in Supplemental Index
Recently, a blogger named “2K” posted a search query format over at SEOmoz which returns only pages which are in Google’s supplemental index. The query is not completely accurate as you will see below, but I was interested in giving it a little test.
If you want to try it, just use the following query format in Google’s search field..
site:www.yourdomain.com ***
The idea hit me to see if there were any significant differences in supplemental results of some of the web’s pioneers and today newer stars. While I am sure the business models and design of these sites also play a role in how many of their pages end up supplemental, I thought it would be fun to check a few anyway.
| Old School Site Pages | Indexed | Supplemental | Percent |
| DMOZ.org | 2,550,000 | 679,000 | 26.6% |
| Amazon.com | 32,100,000 | 39,000,000 | 121.5% |
| EBay.com | 1,150,000,000 | 738,000,000 | 64.1% |
| Web2.0 Site Pages | Indexed | Supplemental | Percent |
| Wikipedia.org | 36,800,000 | 8,620,000 | 23.4% |
| Blogger.com | 2,810,000 | 2,330,000 | 82.9% |
| del.icio.us | 2,880,000 | 23,300 | 00.8% |
Well, the little test didn’t uncover any real consistent significant differences, but with such a small sample I didn’t really expect much. The results were basically all over the board and showed even wider variances depending on if you used the www or non-www form of the URLs. Additionally, this query from only worked on root domains, you can not for example do a search for supplemental pages on www.mydomain.com/articles/.
There were however a couple of interesting observances however. On the old school side, it is interesting to note that while EBay.com has over 1 Million pages indexed in Google, over 64% of them are supplemental. We also found that Web 2.0 is not an automatic advantage when you are trying to stay out of the supplemental index. Blogger.com has over 80% of its pages in the index, however del.icio.us has only an impressive .8% of its 2 million plus indexed pages listed as supplemental. I am betting a lot of this can be traced back to business models and in Blogger.com’s case the abundance of spam blogs being created on the site by users has to be a huge factor.
As I said earlier, this new query is not providing perfect results and the Amazon.com results above prove this point. I thought I would take a close look at what happened in the Amazon results and did a bit of digging. It turns out that the “***” portion of the query can change the status of a page. In the following example; one page is returned in both queries and when the “***” is used, it is changed from a normal listing to a supplemental listing. Look for the listing with the title beginning with the word “Image”
site:www.amazon.com 0735202753 Image
site:www.amazon.com 0735202753 Image ***
This effect can account for a portion of the inconsistency, however I doubt it can account for it all. Additionally, it is not known how this issue effects queries with no obvious reporting problems such as the one Amazon.com shows. One thing I do know, is that these results are at best estimates and should probably only be used for comparison or fun, not serious business.
[...] I am not surprised they did this as I proved that the supplemental index query was completely inaccurate and of no real value. My guess is since it was starting to circulate within the search community, they did not want people using an inaccurate tool thinking it was accurate. Will Google replace or fix the query? I hope so. I would think the best place for such a useful query would be within their Webmasters Tools. This would allow webmasters to see pages on their site which are flagged as supplemental. The one draw back to this for SEO or marketing shops is that would be you would only be able to check the supplemental results for web sites you controlled. [...]