Supplemental or not

[Sadu]

Just noticed some weird goings on with one of my sites these last couple of days.

Has been indexed fine for some time (200 pages, about the same size as the site), and has plenty of good incoming links, mostly naturally baited links but a small amount from directories and link swaps etc. Site is ranking well.

I notice I now have almost all supplemental results, except for my homepage and a couple of others. Most of these subpages that are supplemental are established pages of unique content, mostly PR4/5/6, and have direct links feeding them PR.

These supplemental pages show as supplemental when I search for "site:domain.com". But if I search for "keyword1 keyword2" the pages show up as normal - ranking well and not showing as being supplemental.

This could be Google being Google, or perhaps it's a warning I'm about to be slapped for doing something naughty?

Have not seen this weirdness with the supplemental / non-supplemental pages before. Anyone else know what might be going on?

[SkGold]

In most cases Supplemental means duplicate or very similar content.
If your pages are fairly similar then they will be in Supplemental index.
But if you said that they are all original then try to check if somebody didn’t copy them.

[Sadu]

The site is often getting scraped, but seems to have enough authority to win the duplicate content war - I haven't yet seen a scraper outrank me with my own content. Most of the scrapers are kind enough to provide a link back, so it hasn't bothered me too much.
There are plenty of machine generated pages (tag pages listing similar posts), which I would understand if it was just those. But the vast majority of the site is good, handwritten content and is well linked, and should not be supplemental.

[SkGold]

Originally Posted by Sadu

....and should not be supplemental.

Unfortunately we are not decision makers.
Take a look here it may help.

[sanderson]

Anyway supplemental pages does not have longer life. In very short period of time, they will be gone from the SERPs.

[Sadu]

OK, I managed to find the solution to this one, so here's the heads up...

My pages look like this...

www.example.com/page-name/
This URL has been showing up in SERPs fine.

The pages in the supplemental index look like this...
www.example.com/page-name

I have always known the 2 different URLs will get a different PR, but haven't seen one version go supplemental and the other not. Seems the trailing slash IS a factor to consider when weeding out duplicate content from your site.

Hope this helps someone else pull their site from the supplemental index.