Google’s search results are divided into indexes. You have the main, or regular search results, and the supplemental results. Supplemental results mean last pages of Google’s search. The chances that your ’supplemental’ page will be returned to someone making a query are not very high.

Here’s what Google’s official definition from their webmaster page says:

“A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.”

There was a good analogy of Google supplemental results compared to Siberian work camps. Now you know. It can get as bad as hell if your site suddenly goes down under. Luckily, there are several ways to prevent that from happening:

• Keep page titles unique. It’s super simple. It’s strange some guys still don’t get it. Varying titles also help SEO, accessibility, higher clickthroughs.
• META Description. The description tag must also be unique for each page. The description can match the title tag but it must be there.
• Unique content. This is a common problem with web directories and ecommerce sites which have many funnel pages with very little content. Given the fact that keyword specific content is a must if you want to rank at all, a small amount of website content leads to supplemental results.
• Link building. Inbound links are indicators for search engines that show how trustworthy your website is.  Of course, not all links have the same importance. If some one from a completely different industry is linking to you, their links can mess up your position in search engine results. A different story is when some one from already-ranking domains that are related to your business is linking with a keyword specific anchor text, their links will work miracles towards persuading Google to trust you. Also links from sites with higher PageRank do matter too. This works even better if those links point to a number pages of your website (site-wide linking). Why? Because Google may think if it’s only the homepage that gets all the link-love, other pages are useless thus should go to the supplemental index.

Some one might say that those tactics to avoid Google’s supplemental results are the same as doing a good SEO. It’s true. Therefore if you do a good SEO, you’re protected from Supplemental Results Doom.

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