Posted by randfish
Tonight,
Matt McGee noticed that the supplemental results query at Google, using the format:
site:yoursite.com *** -asdf
is no longer functioning. I'm fairly certain that the source of this issue can be traced back to a Mr. Matt Cutts, who was permitted to sit in at the "Give It Up" session at SMX where one of the first broadly public mentions of the query was brought to light. If you aren't familiar, the query used to display the full list of a site's pages that resided in Google's supplemental index - the place where pages with small amounts of link juice live. After Matt heard people discussing the query, he promised that they would be shutting it off at Google, much to the disappointment of webmasters.
Let me explain why Google should bring the query's functionality back and why it's actually in their best interests to do so.
- Supplemental displays are really only useful to site owners, not competitors. There's not much I can do with the knowledge that one of my competitors has a lot of pages in the supplemental index. (OK, there's one thing*)
- Seeing those results lets site owners identify potential places where they may not be pointing internal links or exposing engines and visitors to content that they've "left by the wayside"
- Having site owners "fix" the supplemental issue on their own, primarily with better internal linking, is fundamentally better for Google and their searchers, because if a site owner values content but doesn't know that Google isn't seeing links to it, they may never recover it properly.
- Googlers - you don't have to make the query public. You can put it inside Webmaster Central and make it only accessible to site owners who've verified themselves.
OK. If you're more of a visual learner type, let's have Googlebot & friends walk you through this:
_
So, what we've learned is a rule that we'll learn again and again. When search engines combine transparency and trust, webmasters win, search engines win and users win. So, how about it, Google?
I just want to share one more story about this. A few weeks back, I was in Washington DC helping the great folks at NPR with some search marketing strategies, and we were able to use this query to see some serious issues with how they archive old content and their link structures on some lost but not forgotten sections of the site. With some changes in site architecture, they'll probably be able to bring some great quality pages, including audio and text content, back into the main index and ranking high in the results where it belongs.
What I'm saying is that we (webmasters) are not using this to do evil, we're using it to do good. Taking away tools that let people do good isn't good. It's evil. Do none of that :)
*That one thing is pretty bad. If you find a site with lots of pages of unique content in supplemental, and you're an evil splog creator or scraper/re-purposer, you can use that content without much risk of being kicked out for duplicate content, because Google doesn't consider those pages particularly valuable. However, Google can certainly find many ways around this, not least of which would be enabling the query through Webmaster Central.
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