Google removes supplemental index

Posted by multippt

Google has recently annouced the discontinuation of the supplemental index. Ok, maybe not a total removal, but more of a improvement to the results. This index is, as it’s name implies, is a supplement to the main index (also known as the primary index). The supplemental index is sort of like a second index, except that pages in the index is treated on a lower priority compared to those on the main index - i.e. they are indexed less and won’t appear in most search results (unless there are very few results), so this is one index you will not want to have too many of your pages appearing in it (the supplementary index also has an alternate name).

Since Google has announced the termination of it, all pages in the supplemental index has been “promoted” to the same level of priority as the other documents, increasing the amount of relevant results (and unfortunately irrelevant ones as well). Might be a great thing don’t you think? The removal of the supplemental index means that more results will be included, and so perhaps more things such as pages in other languages will get a better chance of being picked up by searches. Probably a nice thing for most webmasters.

The change is carried out on a step by step phase - dating back to July 2007, so you can say Google has been planning for this for quite a long time. Thus, the removal of the supplemental index is not too surprising since Google actually prevented people from “predicting” how much of their site is in the supplemental index a few months ago.