Supplemental Cache Refresh Revisited
After the recent supplemental cache refresh, more than a few webmasters asked: “why are my perfectly structured, original content pages still supplemental?” and “Do I have to wait another 12 months for Google to get it right?”
We fixed our META description tags. We got rid of thin content pages. We installed 301 redirects and even validated our pages to death. But the pages with fresh cache were still showing up as supplemental for no apparent reason.
What I assumed was that supplemental pages show up in the SERP after Google looked them over for quality, duplicates, trust, etc. Nope. Things happened the other way around:
1. Google recrawled all existing supplemental pages by looking up urls stored in its supplemental database. One clean sweep. The timestamps were updated and the cache contained the most recent version of each page. Basically, a database update — with zero movement of pages from the supplemental index into the main index.
2. After Google updated its supplemental database, it began a long process of evaluating each URL to decide if its spam, duplicate content, or A1. This is still going on.
I hope you’re starting to see more pages reappear in the main index.
What's Your Take?