It seems that Google has started a new battle. This time they want people to ignore the supplemental results, which are basically the pages that Google feels are not good and will therefore not rank them and will not cache them as often.

Here is Google’s definition from their Webmaster Guidelines:

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.

But why would Google want people to ignore these pages? It seems that if people could focus on making these pages better then Google would be all for it, right? Wrong. In mid July Google removed a function that was allowing people to view all of the pages in their site that were in the supplemental index. This was a very useful tool for many Webmasters.

You used to be able to use, site:www.domain.com****-asssdsd to view your supplemental pages. Webmaster World has a new thread that claims that using site:http://www.domain.com/&, will allow you to view supplemental pages. But the results are mixed on this and some people claim that it is not accurate and provides mixed results for different sites.

I have a little conspiracy theory about this and it goes like this. Why would Google want to dissuade people from viewing or focusing on supplemental results if the goal is to improve pages that Google deems as weak? Well Mr. Google himself, Matt Cutts, is saying that people are becoming too fixated on supplemental results. Well, heck yeah we are all fixated on them! If these pages are the most unlikely to rank for any given terms then as a search engine optimization company or site owner you should be VERY fixated on improving any pages that are in the supplemental results. DUH! So here comes the theory part, I believe that Google does not want people working to improve ALL of their pages because Google is trying to un-clutter their index and is falling behind because of the size of the Web and the amount of crap that gets put up on it every second. If everyone could have all of their pages out of supplemental it would make it that much more difficult for Google to provide good results. Having to sift through and rank billions upon billions of more pages than they already have to would dilute the results and be a big problem as far as relevancy goes.

I am interested to see what other people think about this very hot topic and wonder if anyone else has their own theories on this issue.