Supplemental pages are a challenge for all SEO (Search engine optimization) professionals. We are talking about Google's supplemental pages. A supplemental result is a URL that resides in Google's supplemental index. The supplemental index is a secondary database that has pages with lesser or no page rank and so is considered to be of lesser importance by the search engines. Basically when a page has lesser inbound backlinks coming in, it gets a lower ranking.

Thus now there are the main indexed pages and supplemental pages in a website. If a page's rank is too low, Google will drop it from its main index and that page appears as a supplemental result. The label "Supplemental Result" used to be displayed at the bottom of a search result prior to July 2007.

The Google supplemental pages index first appeared in the summer of 2003. SEO specialists were confused for some time. Most of the new sites find themselves in the Sandbox meaning their pages are not even indexed by the search engine. This could be because most of the web pages were in the supplemental index.

However many authorities in Google say that having a supplemental page is not really a bad thing. When there are not enough pages in the main index then they can get returned during a search.

What can be done to avoid supplement pages? Here are the various causes of getting supplement results.

Duplicate content is not the cause but a side effect of supplemental results. So what is the cure for this malady? Primary solutions include increasing the back links, doing internal links restructuring, keeping content unique and trust management.