Supplemental listings leave limbo?

03 May 2007 @ 10:36 AM

There has been a minor debate recently about “Supplemental Hell“, with Matt Cutts of Google talking about how having pages in the supplementals isn’t necessarily the issue that it used to be. Of course, people aren’t thrilled to be in the supplementals, as they’d much rather be in the main index and rank highly for searches. I prefer to think of supplemental results as being in a state of limbo - a perpetual state of being neither indexed nor non-indexed, due to their not being baptized with the holy link juice, or due to them not being free of original seo sin, such as duplicate content.

From what I’ve seen in the past, pages in the supplemental index are only shown in the results when the pages in the main index that match the query have all been displayed. Is that true? It would appear not to be. Here’s a search I did for “Manassas speaking Heseltine”. The first couple of results were my personal blog from the main index. Then the next result looks like a cloaking scraper site that Google has placed in the supplementals. So there should be no more main index matches for the query right? Wrong, this blog comes in next, and is quite clearly in the main index.

So the question is, now that the Catholic Church has abandoned the concept of limbo, has Google gone the same way, or is this just something that’s always been that way and I’ve only just noticed?