The latest announcement from Google regarding the Supplemental Index should come as no surprise to many who were expecting it. From the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we’ve been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we’ve decided to stop labeling these URLs as “Supplemental Results.”

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve watched Google deactivate commands that used to show webmasters which of their pages were in the Supplemental Index. Even one that was discovered by Barry Schwartz just a couple of days ago has apparently been turned off as well. Many in the webmaster’s community were expecting this change.

I’m still trying to decide exactly how I feel about this. On one hand it will no doubt relieve some stress for those webmasters who used to obsess over their pages falling into Supplemental.

But on the other hand, having the ability to see which pages were Supplemental was a great way to pinpoint areas of your site that needed attention. In addition, we’ve frequently used the Supplemental Index to help build robots.txt files in an attempt to weed out duplicate content and pages that shouldn’t be indexed.

Search Engine Roundtable has been monitoring a couple of forum threads for webmaster’s reactions:

As expected, the reaction is both positive and negative. On one hand, Google promised to show “more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index” by this summer. So even if your pages are in the supplemental index, Google promised to give those pages more prominence in the search results.

Does that mean Google will do so? We do not know. That is the other side of the reaction towards this change. Webmasters and SEOs feel Google silenced them by simply hiding information from us. In fact, they feel that pages in the supplemental index will not only continue to always do poorly in the search results, but now they won’t have a valuable tool to help fix the issues with these pages.

SERoundtable has also included links to those forum discussions so feel free to jump in and join the conversation.

In addition, Search Engine Land has published a fairly exhaustive review of the change, the Supplemental Index in general, and where Google is going with this change. And, finally, a conversation regarding the change is starting over at Sphinn as well.

I hope that Google does add some sort of report to Webmaster Central that shows webmasters their supplemental results. If they don’t I’d seriously have to question their motives for dropping the label. Big G has slowly been getting better about sharing information with website owners; however, dropping the Supplemental label without offering a replacement would most certainly be a step in the opposite direction.

What do you think?