For those of you who don’t know what “supplemental results” are, they are pages that are placed in the secondary index for various reasons such as duplicate content or lack of links to them. This might not seem like a problem, but the pages in the supplemental index will only show in the search results if there are no other pages that match the search term a user is looking for.

The following is my theory based on website testing and research:

When a page is launched:

Google does an analysis of the page which includes a series of unique qualifiers in a few different algorithms to determine which index the page will be placed in, the page rank, the keyword set it will be ranked for, and where it will be ranked. I believe content uniqueness and quality is what Google uses first to determine which index to place the page in.

You have about a month of a page being launched to get quality links to it:

In about a month Google implements a second phase in which it analyzes the page for inbound links from quality sites to determine if it will keep it in the index it was originally placed in. If a page has no links coming into it, Google assumes the content is not what people might be searching for or is not popular, and there is a strong possibility that it will be put into the supplemental index.

Getting Pages Out Of the Supplemental:

Pages in the supplemental index get crawled less frequently than the primary index. So once a page is placed in the supplemental index the quickest way to get it to the primary index is to build QUALITY links to the page from other pages both internal and external.

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