Expert Comments On Supplementary Index

Lately more and more experts have talked about supplemental pages. But practically nothing has been clarified about the confusing issue so far. Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox spoke about it at Pubcon. Adam Lasnik has been talking about it at WebmasterWorld too. So what do we have?

At Search Engine Forums, there is talk about a Matt Cutts video in which "he states that their are 2 indexes, regular and supplemental, it seems pages go into supplemental if they are not fresh or something???"

At the Pubcon Matt and Vanessa remarked that supplemental pages are not essentially negative. But aren't your pages losing credibility for a visitor? So how else can they be seen? Any views? 

Adam Lasnik, for his part, posted The skinny on the supplemental index. He said that:

we do not move a site's pages from our main to our supplemental index in response to any violations of our Webmaster Guidelines.

At WebmasterWorldForum he clarified that:

Pages are in the supplemental results because we still wanted to be able to show them to users, but the pages didn't have enough PageRank to make it into our main index (which is more extensive and updated with greater frequency).

Getting more *quality* backlinks is generally a good way to get more of your pages in the main index.

And the suggested cure:

Get more quality backlinks.  This is a key way that our algorithms will view your pages as more valuable to retain in our main index.

He goes on to say that:

The days of getting tons of search traffic just by putting up a site are (thankfully) long-gone.  If you don't make an effort to engage others or — worse — simply put up a flashy (or contrastingly boring-as-heck) Web site that's an island unto itself, why SHOULD others care, much less visit?

Does that clear the cloud?

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