Should google have a supplemental Index?

Hi guys..

These days watchin so many posts on google's hell, I was wondering what would be your thoughts on that? Do you think google needs to have 2 index options, main as well supplemental?

This thread is not at all my innovation, but while I was reading SER I was interested/motivated in knowing a few reasons/thoughts as to what you all think..

IMHO, its is somewhat important, just because things like duplicate content, lack of links, lack of content, etc, can be avoided very well.. But somewhere loss of some good stuff is there too..

So what do you guys think should google do with the Index? Should it stayed, revise, or removed?

Its Just a thought..Share up your points and Ideas..

Well, first of all, it is of course not up to us to decide whether Google has a supplemental index. There are several good reasons for Google to have it - one of them being to keep the SEOs busy discussing it ;-)

So, the first thought probably is that the supplemental index is bad and we all want our pages in the main index.

But then again, that would mean that all our competitors would have all their pages in the main index, too! That way, we'd lose a possibility to gain an edge by designing good pages which are in the main index while our uninformed competitors - if they are - might have their pages in the supplemental index. Seen this way, we can build pages that are in the main index and do not need to compete against pages that don't deserve being in the main index.

Fundamentally I think it's there for performance. Keeping the main index to a reasonable size allows them to continue to deliver subsecond response times on the SERPS. Cost management probably comes into it as well.

I would extend on this in offer the argument i first saw put by john .. That google has three indexes, the small one (for competative words). The main one .. and the supp index. This is i expect fundemenatly a resource management issue i would expect. Why search the entire net if ya don't have to... Competative words google only needs to search small index .. to get enough quality content it doesn't need to go any further.... Less competative words neeeds biger search to deliver what it considers enough decent content/choice.... Supp index is then for the ..what if.. stuff. Just so google in theory can display anything/everything.

I would guess its going to be a race between better technolgy and speed of web growth as to wether these indexes stay..

Cost management... Hmmm.. John Explain that one please.. seems Interesting..Is that from google's point of view as a company or from SEO'ers point view, or from both?

From the point of view of Google the company. Google's expenditure on servers and disk arrays is astronomical and prior to the Big Daddy infrastructure changes it was escalating rapidly with spam sites with auto-generated pages numbering a million and more.

I think google should have it otherwise what is the use of making a site with good content.

We would love to see a site with good stuff first, then the
other stuff only if we need to.

What if a site with good stuff for whatever reason is in the second index.I think thats the reason why google has started this supplemental index on a probably experimental basis,and which seems successful to me.

I see no problems here. Pages only go supp if Google feels they aren't good enough for the regular index so if there was no supp they would likely not rank well anyways in most cases. I don't worry about it being there but about how to keep my pages out of it. Although a page can rank awesome for thousands of long-tail phrases and still be supp. That is one thing many webmasters fail to target.

Yes You are right Visio, The only worthy thing that can be pulled out from supps, is that they can be targetted for long tail searches, as google doesnt have more to show for such terms..Still Keeping it secondary.. Dont you think so, that pages in primary index would do much better then supp index pages, and that too when we have an option to cure the supplementals..

Nice point btw, I dont think I ever wandered on that part..

Well I see it this way. The supp index tells me whether Google thinks my pages are good enough for the regular index or not. This actually can be a blessing in disguise. Otherwise we would have all our pages in the reg index but we wouldn't know google sees them poorly. If I find a page of mine that is supp I try to figure out why. What is wrong with it, is it content-less, why does google see it as lower value then my other pages? I have to be honest, without it I wouldn't be able to figure out as well what pages need more help than others. So I conclude it is useful.
I said that about long-tail. Supp pages do very well with supp but regular index pages can do even better. The thing is many people think that supp pages are doomed and can never perform well. That is just not true. Of course if at all possible you should attempt to get the page in the normal index but attempting to target the long-tail world can over-time help that page enter the normal index if it is supp at the moment.

I hope some of that made since. I was just babbling on