Google Removes “Supplemental Results” Tag

If you’re like me, you will have struggled with the term Supplemental results since 2003. They have been the source of many headaches & frustration, not to mention sheer panic.

Well, Google has finally announced that they’ll no longer be labelling Supplemental Results.

The changes we make must focus on improving the search experience for our users. Since 2006, we’ve completely overhauled the system that crawls and indexes supplemental results. The current system provides deeper and more continuous indexing. Additionally, we are indexing URLs with more parameters and are continuing to place fewer restrictions on the sites we crawl. As a result, Supplemental Results are fresher and more comprehensive than ever. We’re also working towards showing more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index, and expect to roll this out over the course of the summer.

Whilst this may initially sound good, it’s hard to tell how this will effect search marketers. It all depends on how much visibility supplemental results will continue to get as changes are introduced, will this visibility increase?

I’ve always been a big fan of the labelling of Supplementals. It allows me to quickly assess a website for any particular problems, including:

1. Link Saturation
2. Indexing Problems
3. Duplicate Content Problems

I’ve heard rumors that this may be getting integrated into the Webmaster Console but if you check out Matt Cutts latest poll, there’s much jucier features i’d like to see first (and everyone else for that matter).