Matt Cutts wrote yesterday about recent infrastructure changes on his blog detailing everything from the recent Google PR update to a more detailed explanation into how supplemental results work. The information also included some fixes for sites that are hosted outside the US and were not showing up in regional Google locations such as google.co.uk. There has been some discussion about this on the forums at Digital Point and I thought it important to point out because Matt mentions some relevant thoughts on links and the freshness of supplemental links. He even claims you might even start seeing some more traffic from your supplemental results!
On the topic of supplemental results and links Matt said:
As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of...Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank... I think going forward, you’ll continue to see the supplemental results get even fresher, and website owners may see more traffic from their supplemental results pages.If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).
That last part about white hat whatnot we would expect Matt to say that, the part about links is a bit interesting. It's not necessary new info at all, but its often forgotten. Sometimes we can look at links statically as never changing, where quantity is a healthier indicator than actual quality. We know this not to be true however. This way of thinking is an age old trap for newcomers in our industry to understand this. One of the members on Digital Point commented about the best way to get pages out of supplemental is to point some links at them. Great, but that may not last forever. Other times its all you need to do.
Continued discussion on Digital Point and Matt Cutts Comments
