Google search supplemental results seem to make no difference to ranking

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

I’ve noticed something interesting today.

Once again, trawling through the logs of an experimental site I have which contains far from original content (no surprise most of the pages are in the supplemental results), I noticed something which surprised me in relation to search engine rankings.

Some of those “supplemental” pages are still out ranking “non-supplemental” pages for the exact same keywords.

Now my understanding of the supplemental index is that it’s a “secondary index” where google goes fossicking around looking for results if it can’t find any good ones in its main index for a certain keyword/phrase.

This has been an interesting experiment, since google started dumping pages into the supplemental index, traffic (from google) has dropped by about 80%, but I’m still getting a tricke, and still out-ranking other non supplemental pages for the exact same keywords.

Any SEO experts out there who can tell me why this might be happening, and what it means?
.