At “Give It Up” at the SMX there was a discussion that site owners can display all of their supplemental results by doing a search for [– site:www.yourdomain.com *** -qerdafjadfs]. This option has suddenly disappeared as many blogs have reported.
Matt Cutts made a comment at SEOmoz:
“Anyway, a couple quick thoughts:
– This query wasn’t new to us at the “Give It Up” session. It’s been talked about publicly before, e.g. http://www.seobook.com/archives/002047.shtml back in February. If anything, the “Give It Up” mention of this query was more of a reminder to check on why this wasn’t fixed yet.
– I believe it’s good to remove this query because I don’t want people to get fixated on Supplemental Results and focus on them to the exclusion of other aspects of SEO. We saw that happen with the toolbar PageRank bar and ended up slowing the update rate on the visible toolbar PageRank to every 3-4 months so that people didn’t spend too much of their time concentrating on PageRank and less on other parts of good SEO.
– Over time, the supplemental results are less and less supplemental and more and more likely to show up for any given query. As I mentioned at SMX Seattle, my personal preference would be to drop the “Supplemental Result” tag altogether because those results are 1) getting fresher and fresher, and 2) starting to show up more and more often for regular web searches. Especially as the supplemental results get more fresh, I’d like to leave that tag behind because it still has some negative connotations for people who remember the previous implementation of supplemental results (which has now mostly been replaced with a newer/better implementation).
Those are the main reasons why I think it makes sense to change this query.”
Speculation is maybe Google will drop the supplemental, but I wonder if it will be replaced with another tag. Matt said, “…still has some negative connotations…”. So, does that mean that because the word “supplemental” has a negative connotation that it would be better to replace it with another word?
Supplemental has its place because it helps us avoid junk. My issue is that many good web sites with proper coding and orginal content are being thrown into supplemental. I think that Google needs to look at why this is happening and stop it.
All we can do is wait and see, but if they replace the name it isn’t going to make much difference, is it?
