You’ve been working hard on your site, posting new content regularly, playing by the rules, being a good netizen and all that good stuff. One day you decide to check and see how you are doing in Google’s index. So you type in site:yoursite.com to see how many pages have been indexed.

Oh the horror!

A large portion of your pages are listed with the phrase “Supplemental Result” next to them.

Supplemental results are just that—supplemental. Provided when the primary variants aren’t good enough, or when someone who is starving consumes all the other results and still wants more. This means that your pages aren’t going to have the optimal traffic generating characteristics that you’d hoped for.

Two Possibilities with Supplemental Results

Take a deep breath—supplemental results aren’t the end of the world. There are two main situations where supplemental results come into play:

1. Your pages are new, and Google isn’t sure about them just yet. They are in supplemental results for a while until Google integrates them into the main search index. You just have to wait for a while (2 months should be enough). This happened to over 100 of DiamondLime’s pages after I moved my site and was first indexed at the new domain name.
2. Google doesn’t like your pages as much as the alternatives. This is tougher than simply having to wait like in case #1, but again, not the end of the world. There are things you can do to get your pages to move into the main index.

Page Rehab - Getting Pages out of Supplemental Results

There are things you can do to get your pages out of supplemental results. The central point is that you have to do things that will make your pages better (or at least seem better) than the alternatives. Here is a list of things you can do to get a page out of the supplemental results, starting with the most effective:

1. Get links from other sites to the page that needs to move out of supplemental results
2. Link to the page from other pages on your site
3. Add useful content
4. Improve your on-page SEO elements.

Get Links from Other Sites

The most powerful factor for moving your site’s pages out of supplemental results is to have other web sites link directly to your pages. This deep linking tells Google that someone values your content enough to link to it, and that immediately puts you up over all the resources that aren’t linked to from external sites.

Link to the Page from Your Site

If you link to your struggling page from many varied locations on your web site, you are telling Google (and other search engines) that out of the pages on your site, you deem this particular page to be important. This is almost as effective as getting an external link. Don’t overdo it, though, or you may shake the balance of your site’s SEO up too much.

Add Useful Content

Adding to and modifying the content on your struggling page indicates to search engines that you are trying to improve the page and that this particular resource is up to date.

Improve On-page SEO Factors

Improving your page’s SEO for on-page elements (headers, titles, etc.) is like waxing your car—it’s the same old car, but it looks like it’s worth more.

Once you’ve done what you can, wait. It can take quite a while. SEO requires patience. If, though, after 6 months and two passes at improving your page, you don’t have rankings, it may be time to focus on another page targeting that term.

Best of luck getting out of the supplemental results! It is possible, I did it—as of this writing, not one of the pages indexed on my site is a supplemental result.