Roughly one week after submitting my Google Sitemaps file, it looks like most of the pages have been added to Google. Although, about half of them seem to still be in Google’s Supplemental Index.

Google’s Supplemental Index seems to be a sort of holding area for pages that haven’t been included into the regular index yet. There is a a lot of speculation about the index. It seems like it may contain “orphan” pages - pages that have no other incoming links, or dynamic pages that can’t be crawled for one reason or another. It has been confirmed that the supplemental results only show for a query with very few results from the regular index.

Here is what Google says about the index:

Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary 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.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.

At any rate, I’m hoping that these pages move to the regular index. Travel terms are competitive enough that I can’t imagine the supplemental results would ever be called up in a real-world search.

For another take on Sitemaps and how they may help you out of the Supplemental Index, see this post at Search Engine Roudtable.


Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO