In an earlier post I spoke about Google’s planned removal of the supplementals tag from their results. They went ahead with it and it caused quite a stir amongst webmasters and SEOs. Various people have looked for alternative ways to discover which of their pages are still in the supplemental index. US SEO firm Bruce Clay have come up with the following query –

-site:www.mysite.com/* site:www.mysite.com/

which so far seems to do the job. Thanks guys, let’s hope Google don’t pull it.

I noticed that the same, or at least very similar results can be deduced in Webmaster Tools by looking at the Internal Links report. Not all your pages are shown, and if a page isn’t listed in there then it’s a fair bet that it’s a supplemental. On my sites it seems to be the case that pages with very few internal links are still ok if they have a link from the home page but if they only have links from subsidiary pages and no external inbound links then they won’t have enough PageRank and will fall into the “Dungeons of Doom” (cue maniacal laughter), where their chances of ranking for anything will be poor. That seems to match what we know so far of the reasons for supplementals.

Now why can’t it all just depend on quality?