Over the hol­i­days I was read­ing an arti­cle from WebProNews on the Sup­ple­men­tal Index. If you are unfa­mil­iar with the term, let me explain.

Back in 2003 Google intro­duced the Sup­ple­men­tal Index. This was an index (data­base) where web sites, pages went when not up to stan­dards (less impor­tant or less trusted) for Google’s main index (data­base). Now this expla­na­tion is a ‘brief’ to say the least, but you get the idea.

Many busi­ness own­ers were quite upset, and right­fully so, by this because if some­one typed in a search term / phrase and your site / pages were in the Sup­ple­men­tal Index your site would not come up IF oth­ers did show for the search in the main index. They would only show IF they search did not turn up results in the main index.

It’s been reported by Google Search Qual­ity Team that now when some­one types in a search term / phrase both the main and sup­ple­men­tal index will be searched. This is indeed good news.

Read more about this here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/ultimate-fate-of-supplemental-results.html

Happy New Year!

Jan

Unfor­tu­nately not for the good

I noticed yes­ter­day that my page rank had dropped. The drop was not dras­tic, but since it took a lot of hard work to get it from a 5 to a 6 it was very depress­ing to see it back at a 5.

First thing I did was check out my fav forum Web Pro World. Seems I am not the only one that is see­ing the change, though not are all bad.

Now some are of the opin­ion that Page Rank really doesn’t mat­ter as long as you are still get­ting the traf­fic. In some respects I agree with that, but if noth­ing else I see page rank as a pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive Google ‘handshake’.

It appears the scoop is the drop is from ‘inter-linking’ and/or ‘sell­ing links’. Well I do have links to sites I have cre­ated. I think that is just part of busi­ness, these are web­sites my com­pany has cre­ated — the port­fo­lio. I cer­tainly don’t have paid links. Some are also say­ing it is the Big Play­ers that have been “spanked”. Well I would not put my com­pany in the Big Player cat­e­gory, at least the def­i­n­i­tion it seems they are using.

So why the drop?

Since paid links is not an issue my next step is check­ing out what is going on in my stats pro­grams. Google Ana­lyt­ics and Crafty Syn­tax — Live Help, which I can use to com­mu­ni­cate with folks who visit my site and more.

If you want to read an arti­cle about what is being called “Pager­ank Smack­down” Click here.
Cer­tainly one con­cern I have is that the ‘hack’ I had awhile back is now com­ing back to haunt me. (You can read more about that here Surely Google would check this con­sid­er­ing I even posted a remark to Matt Cutts (not that I heard any­thing back) and they are say­ing sites were viewed by humans and not just a script. This is a scary thought.

One thing to keep in mind when read­ing this is that Page Rank and search rank and two dif­fer­ent things. I checked a cou­ple of key­word phrase search terms for my site and I am still doing ok.

Jan