According to a new post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, the supplemental index is no longer, well, supplemental. Google has long had a two-tiered index and webmasters have generally feared the second, supplemental tier.
With this latest change, Google says that searchers will see a larger set of relevant documents from a deeper slice of the web in results, particularly for non-English queries. Supplemental pages that previously had little chance of ranking now will be queried and scored for relevancy along with the rest of the pages in the index and now potentially have a much better chance of being shown.
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With this latest change, Google says that searchers will see a larger set of relevant documents from a deeper slice of the web in results, particularly for non-English queries. Supplemental pages that previously had little chance of ranking now will be queried and scored for relevancy along with the rest of the pages in the index and now potentially have a much better chance of being shown.
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But there is something really bugged to hell, or significantly changed in this.Admittedly I have been out of circulation a lot for the last 2 weeks so haven’t been keeping tabs, but it seems a site:domain.com/* search is returning about half the results it use to previously return.
Time for people to check their traffic logs to see if they’re finally ranking for stuff they couldn’t before. I do wonder if Google is indexing less pages than before to make up for this change though.
Pre July: We don’t think your page is worthy of appearing in our search results. Sorry but it’s not all that, is it? I mean look at the content. Nothing new there, is there? And the way you’ve built it with the generic meta stuff? C’mon, did you really think we’d fall for that old chestnut? Face it buddy, your page sucks.Post December: Dude! We love your page! Let’s include it in our index.C’mon. All they’ve done is repackage the old SI. The ranking method that sat behind the old SI will still be in place.
I am not seeing any difference at all.