Google Stops Labeling Supplemental Results, Should You Care?

There's been a pretty fair amount of buzz this week in the search world about Google's move to stop labeling search results that are part of the supplemental index. While this move will have an impact on search marketing firms who spend morning, noon and night obsessing about each and every page they work on, the average small business owner really doesn't need to worry themselves about it. Why?

Well, the average small business owner is not a search engine marketing specialist. They don't have time to be a search engine marketing specialist and they don't want to be a search engine marketing specialist. They simply want to make sure their pages are ranking as well as they can while they focus on actually running their business.

In fact, I've found myself at search marketing conferences chatting with small business owners that are now obsessed with whether or not they have pages in the supplemental results because they heard on some panel that it was the "kiss of death" for their site.

Funny, I remember hearing that same thing about the so-called sandbox.

And PageRank.

Here's the reality. Yes, the supplemental index label is handy for search marketers that are carefully watching every last URL on a site they are managing. It can tip them off to some changes they need to make in the way they approach optimizing and promoting a certain page.

For your every day business owner, having a page in the supplemental index simply means you need to work on building links and optimizing your pages more efficiently.

Think about it. If your page isn't ranking as well as it could, do you want to sit around obsessing about the fact that the page is in the supplemental index, or do you want to spend your time improving your site and individual pages so you get moved into the primary index and have a better chance of ranking well for your choice terms?

Yes, PageRank can help you rank better. Yes, it takes time for new sites to get indexed and to rank well. Yes, it's better to be in the standard index than in the supplemental results.

But if you're a small business owner trying to improve your web marketing while running your businesses, it's a lot more worth your while to focus on continuing to build relevant optimized web pages that attract quality links than it is to obsess about the semantics of why your page isn't ranking.

Let your web analytics tell you which pages you need to improve, not a little label assigned by Google.