Over the previous a number of days I’ve seen a bunch of SEOs sharing details about the Google supplemental index and speaking website positioning methods associated to it. Simply as a PSA, the Google supplemental index has not been in existence for a dozen or so years now.
Immediately, in 2022, there isn’t a such factor because the Google Supplemental Index.
Sure, pre-2010, Google maintained two indexes for technical causes. The principle index was up to date extra steadily and sooner and the supplemental index was for pages of decrease significance that did not should be up to date as shortly. Typically, pages in the primary index would rank larger in Google Search than pages within the supplemental index. And Google would usually solely rank pages within the supplemental index if it could not discover good matches in the primary index.
Actually, Google use to label search outcomes that got here from the supplemental index, as such. Here’s a screenshot I posted again in 2007 with this label:
In December 2007, Google began to cover the supplemental index label, stating “We improved the crawl frequency and decoupled it from which index a doc was saved in, and as soon as these “supplementalization results” have been gone, the “supplemental outcome” tag itself—which solely served to counsel that in any other case good paperwork have been in some way suspect— was eradicated just a few months in the past. Now we’re coming to the following main milestone within the elimination of the synthetic distinction between indices: quite than looking out some a part of our index in additional depth for obscure queries, we’re now looking out the entire index for each question.”
Then in 2009 Google began testing a brand new indexing technique known as Caffeine and in 2010, Google launched Caffeine totally. With that launch, Google stopped utilizing the supplemental index all collectively. Heck, Google nonetheless makes use of Caffeine in the present day…
In any occasion, John Mueller of Google was requested to substantiate that the supplemental index just isn’t longer and he mentioned on Twitter it is protected to say that index from 2003 is now having fun with the good bit-bucket within the sky.”
In 2007 we talked about the distinction was minimal ( https://t.co/7lVBkBlzVl , https://t.co/bxRIm1wyW2 ), in 2010 we revamped the indexing techniques utterly ( https://t.co/W9jVSD4D91 ) so it is protected to say that index from 2003 is now having fun with the good bit-bucket within the sky.
— 🐝 johnmu.csv (private) 🐝 (@JohnMu) June 26, 2022
So do not let anybody confuse you or set you off within the flawed route – Google’s index works otherwise than it did pre-2010 than it does post-2010 and there’s no supplemental index anymore.
Discussion board dialogue at Twitter.