Incoming Links From Pages In The Supplemental Index
BREAKING NEWS:
“I’m curious to know whether pages which are in the supplemental index still have their links counted by Google. What’s your theory on this? I have a number of sites that have been created purely for the purpose of providing links to other sites, I’m not concerned if these sites are in the main index or not, I only want their links registered.”
Hi Gary,
I can’t say that I’ve specifically isolated this out as a valid test.
To do so would require us to obtain incoming links to a new website ONLY from third party websites (and only from pages within those websites) that are in the supplemental index.
That’s a very hard test to conduct – to ensure all of those pages on third party websites are in fact in the supplemental index and there are no other external factors influencing the test.
Also gaining the volumes of this type of link in order to make any head way at all on potential ranking improvements (other than just to see if the new website simply becomes indexed) is tough.
However based on my experience (and numerous discussions with colleagues) I would have to say I’m 99% convinced that incoming links of this type do count towards your link popularity and add to the theme relevancy of a website.
They just wont count as much as links of higher or better search engine optimization value.
I’m a staunch supporter of the “a link is a link and every link holds value” policy.
Regardless of whether an incoming link has a positive search engine optimization impact, it’s still an additional entry point to your website that someone will eventually find.
The interesting thing is that I was actually having a discussion with a colleague a few weeks back on this very topic.
His company does search engine optimization exclusively for local firms and they have an in house blog network that they use to generate incoming links to clients websites.
Without getting into the specifics, most of the content posted to these blogs is duplicate content (third party articles), and as such, many of the pages are in Google’s supplemental index.
However via the use of tags on the blog posts he makes to drop his clients links in (to gain incoming links), they are able to generate excellent search engine rankings for geo-specific keywords in some pretty competitive industries.
Of course, it’s much easier if you’re being geo-specific like that because competition is a lot less in comparison to obtaining high search engine rankings for “insurance quotes” for example.
So whilst incoming links from pages in the supplemental index probably don’t hold as much SEO value, they hold enough to produce results in this example anyway.
So again, I’m 99% convinced that they do hold value.
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
Hi Duncan,
Correct me if my theory is wrong but aren’t sites that are in the supplemental index in that supplemental index for whatever specific term you typed in? In other words, for another search query they may not be in the supplemental index. So in reality your link would be counted the same as any similar type of link.
Hi Jon, it depends on what you mean by the supplemental index.
The supplemental index IS NOT the additional results you see after you click on the following link in Google…
“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 43 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
…these are just “Additional Similar Results”.
Supplemental indexed pages are marked as being “supplemental” in the actual search results next to the specific listing. If they are in the supplemental index then that’s where they remain (unless heavily modified).
And more often than not, given that they are in the supplemental index for a reason, they’re going to show up as supplemental for pretty much all keyword terms a user could search on to find them anyway (i.e. they’re suffering from duplicate content issues which means someone else with the same content IS showing in the primary index and beating them for the same search terms and traffic).
Can you give me an example of a page in the supplemental index? I have never seen something labeled as supplemental. Or maybe wasn’t looking.
Here you go…
Notice it’s actually marked as a Supplemental Result. They are not that common to see when searching every day and generally only appear when searching on very specific and unsual keyword terms / combinations.
Thanks for the detailed response Duncan. I do something similar to your colleagues (using a blog network to create links) and it has been effective up to now. Mostly duplicate content as you say.
What does concern me slightly though is the lack of pagerank assigned to any of these blogs. In 80% of the cases, a gray pagerank bar – even though the blogs have pages indexed, and are returned in search results for certain keywords.
I’m sure they’re not banned, but in some cases the blogs are almost 2 years old, and still gray pagerank. I’m wondering if the fact that they are blogs is significant here. Most blogs would be a sub domain name of the ‘host’ site (yourblog.wordpress.com), and perhaps any pagerank is improving the main site??
Pagerank is something I continually tell myself not to be concerned with, but the gray bars do worry me sometimes. The blogs are obviously indexed and should be all white pagerank at the very least.
Thanks for this post Duncan. Now I have validated the notion of “every link counts”, high PR or not.