But until Google fixes the problem I have no intention of forgetting about it.

At least knowing which page is Supplemental tells me where to point more links when it comes time to do some link building.

@Bill - I agree that people worry, but I don’t think they can do much with that concern. Google says it’s reduced the significance of whether a web page sits in the regular index or the supplemental index. That’s what needed to be done. Changes probably need to be seen on a timescale measured in weeks and months rather than days. Look at results in the next month or two and see whether there is improvement. How do your web pages compare with those that are high in the important keyword searches?

What counts is the relevance of the results? If they are still unsatisfactory in your eyes, then that may be due to the algorithms used. The operational question of whether they hold web pages in two indexes or one may have very little to do with the new ordering of results.

To give an example, I rebuilt a site for a client who’s navigation and structure were poor, and in doing so I and she wrote some excellent new content (a description of the broad areas where her business was operating and about 50 supporting pages detailing specific towns and villages in those areas) which would be of great use to her users. For a few weeks after indexing it ranked very well, then it dropped to the supplemental index and from then on it didn’t rank in the first 500 for any related term, not even the title tags of the pages.

Ironically the site now ranks for the “harder” generic terms it’s going after but none of the “easier” specific terms that the new content was highly relevant for. The latter is purely because of the existence of the supplemental index. That’s why people are concerned about it.

The problem with Google’s Supplemental Results Index is that they show less relevant content in the Main Web Index before they show more relevant content from the Supplemental Results Index.

This is true even with site searches. And though our tests cannot be perfect, every credible test and estimate I have seen (and those I have performed myself) appear to indicate that as much as 75-80% of the Web is in the Supplemental Results Index.

The quality of Google’s search results has declined over the past few months since they rolled out Google 3.0 (Universal Search). They are only making things worse by de-emphasizing RELEVANCE in favor of Pageank.

Instead of telling everyone to bury their heads in the sand and pretend there is no problem, people in the SEO community need to line up and say, “Google, enough of this CRAP, give us RELEVANT RESULTS!”