Sometimes called "supplemental hell," Google's supplemental results can be damaging to any web site that has dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of pages that fall into that auxiliary part of Google's results. Before I go into further details with examples and fixes, and if you're interested to see if you have pages that are in Google's supplemental results, you can use this search operator to check your Web site's supplemental results: site:www.putsitenamehere.com *** -jwi8sjh. If you find pages within your web site listed in this "secondary results" partition of Google's index, those pages are likely not ranking well nor are those pages deemed to have as much page equity or value as compared other pages of your web site that reside in the normal Google SERPs.

Revisiting the progression of supplementals over the past year or so, I went back to before "Big Daddy," a major Google update that happened during the first part of last year where many webmasters noticed a huge influx of their pages fall victim to this not-so-good place to be in Google. Matt Cutts has openly discussed supplemental results many times on his blog as well as countless of other web sites or blogs. Let's look at how you end up in supplemental results.

Google Supplemental Result Causes

• Too much duplicated content - Affiliate or xml fed sites who use the same content site-wide to drive sales/traffic can trigger supplemental results.
• Bloated code to content ratios - Sites with only a little changing "content" per page and lots of static non-changing elements, i.e. navigation, columns, site wrapper elements, etc., get put into supplemental results often because the content is only 3 or 5% of the total page.
• No backlinks to internal or deep pages - For example, if you have a site with 10k pages and only the top level pages, let's say 500 total, have links pointing to them, other pages deep within the the site are treated differently, often looked at as lessor value or importance.
• Poor URL paths, dynamic URLs, or access files permissions - Errors in your .htaccess file, robots.txt file, or another page handling method server-side could be blocking or partially blocking compete access to the pages you want or need indexed.
• Last, but most important - not enough good content! - Without good, unique content and a decent amount of backlinks pointing to pages within your site at deeper levels, you could have those pages or complete sections fall victim to supplemental results "hell" as the result.

If you see that you have any of the above problems and want to try to rectify the situation, here are a few ways you can work your way upward, hopefully knocking some of or all of those pages out of supplemental results and back into Google's regular index.

Fixing Supplemental Results in Google

• Fix duplicate content - Make sure that you subside duplicate content such as an xml or affiliate feed with worthy, unique written content somewhere on the page(s) - preferably above the duplicate content you have on the page so that Googlebot sees it before hitting your duplicate content when they crawl. This may be enough to let them know that there actually is "real" content on the page.
• Tighten up wasted Pagerank loss - If you have architectural problems or your Pagerank from a main category page is spread across hundreds or thousands of sub-category pages this could be fixed or re-engineered to prevent so much dilution of your top level page equity.
• Look at page code to content ratios and the trend of your supplementals. If you have too much code and little actual content, fix it! Rework or remove redundant code and navigation and give Google and other search engines the real meat of the page, not all that fluff and filler that's hurting on-page value.
• Link to deep pages - If you need to go back and add more content to older pages or update others then fine, but link to them to show that deeper content on your site is of value.
• Too many targeted keywords on a page? This may be hurting your supplemental pages as well. Tone it down a notch or two. Make your primary keywords only 8-10% of overall copy instead of 30-50% which may be the reason why the page or pages are in supplemental ;-).
• Change up backlink anchors and internal anchor text pointing to your deep pages (and main pages for that matter). Natural is better and in the real world people will link to you using lots of different anchors anyway.
• Ask for a review - If you've done the above and remain in the supplemental results for another two months, then contact Google through the Webmaster Tools section to hopefully prompt a manual review.
• Review your server files - Look at your .htaccess files or server-side files for exclusions or partial exclusions or redirects of categories, sections, and pages. Look at your robots.txt file to see what you're excluding. Clean up anything you find wrong but make sure you know what you're doing because these files can sometimes be tricky if you do not know regular expressions.

More Creative Ways to get Out of Supplemental Results

• Get creative - If links are your problem and you need more value within your site's pages and categories, you can knock them out of supplemental results by building useful tools or a valuable resource section/page that aligns with your market or industry to gain backlinks to sections or pages.
• Drop and redirect pages or old sections of your web site that have little value and point (301 permanently redirect) them to another section of the site that does have value. This could make sense especially if you have redundancy of sections.
• Hire someone who knows what they are doing. If you're unsure, always ask for help or advice on how to get out of the problem.

There are so many factors that play a part in why your site might end up in Google's supplemental results. Hopefully, others will give some good advise here on how to move pages out of supplemental results to go along side mine above.

UPDATE: 7-31-07 / From a little further research it seems that Google has temporarily disabled the supplemental search results query because they feel it's being taken advantage of much like the old days of concentrating too much on Google Pagerank. WebmasterWorld reports more on supplemental results being disabled.

UPDATE: 8-7-07 / Danny Sullivan also included this quote on his blog in regards to Google supplemental results and how to possibly view them moving forward:

First, get a list of all of your pages. Next, go to the webmaster console [Google Webmaster Central] and export a list of all of your links. Make sure that you get both external and internal links, and concatenate the files. Now, compare your list of all your pages with your list of internal+external backlinks. If you know a page exists, but you don't see that page in the list of site with backlinks, that deserves investigation. Pages with very few backlinks (either from other sites or internally) are also worth checking out.

Here's some other sources talking about why's and fixes to supplemental results that make for good reading (and site tweaking):

Reasons why pages drop out of google index
How to remove Supplemental pages
Google Supplemental Results. Getting out of Google's Supplemental Hell