Check Your Google CrappyPages - site:domain.com/&

7th August 2007

Since Google has discontinued their labeling of pages as Supplemental Results, what shall we call them now? I guess until Google names them officially, I’ll call them the “CrappyPages”.

The words, “Supplemental Results” always required a long explanation anyway, with many different interpretations of exactly what it meant, and many different theories on how to get rid of them, or whether or not, you even needed to get rid of them.
Crappypages sort of sums it right up, and tells you exactly what they are, doesn’t it?

Perhaps Google just got rid of the name “supplementals” because they were tired of reading so many articles and theories about them?

We could call them, “near worthless pages that might not pass PageRank, and don’t often rank well in the SERPS for competitive phrases, or pages that might be duplicate content”, but that’s quite a mouthful. It’s much easier to say “Crappypages”, isn’t it?

Clearly there is something about the Crappypages that causes Google to distinguish them from others, and even though the “Supplemental Results” label is gone, we can see that Google is still keeping track of them…

There used to be a search modifier / hack that worked to see all your supplemental pages (site:www.mydomain.com ***) but that stopped working over a month ago, right before Google got rid of the name.

There’s a strong case to be made that some of us really like knowing which pages are considered crappy, and now, perhaps not coincidentally, there’s a new hack out.

It’s yet to be named, but searching for this will bring up your own visible Google Crappypages:

site:domain.com/&

Most people are calling it a new hack for supplementals, but it seems to me that it’s actually a different group of results than I got before with the Supplemental hack. Are they crappier? Hard to say…

So how do you get your pages out of the “CrappyPages”?
When it was called “supplemental results”, you could freshen the content on the pages, either manually or sometimes through integration of subject relevant RSS feeds, and you could shoot a few links at them.

Generally, this method would bring a page out of the supplemental index in short time, and if it didn’t, then in all likelihood, it was really a worthless page anyway, that you didn’t need to keep.

To me, the pages I am finding in the Crappypages actually do seem to have some different results than the pages I was finding in the supplementals.

It’s very rare to find a website that doesn’t have at least some entries in the CrappyPages, and my own is certainly no exception.

With some diligence and a little bit of effort, the truly crappy and the duplicate pages can be removed from the index altogether, and the desirable pages can be brought out successfully.

Until further notice, I’m going to operate under the theory that the same method for getting pages out of supplementals will still work for the CrappyPages. If not, I’ll keep you posted.