Google has removed the ‘Supplemental Result’ label shown in the search results and disabled the search operators that could be used to list them (see their official blog).

Many of the comments on the official blog post post lament the loss of this label as it was a useful way to easily see the pages that Google thought were less important. The post says that Google is working to integrate supplemental results with the normal index so ‘The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow’.

I can see why people are getting het up about it, but when it comes down to it webmasters just have to continue to try to doing their job well – creating pages full of new, unique content. That’s how you get pages into Google’s index.

Anyway, it makes the supplemental pages bookmarklet I created redundant.

This bookmarklet allows you to see if a page is included in Google’s index.

Drag the following link to your toolbar or right click and add to your bookmarks or favourites: Google Pages Indexed

If you are viewing the root domain of the site (e.g. http://www.domainname.com), the bookmarklet will show all the pages within the domain that are included in Google. If you use the bookmarklet when you are viewing a sub page, it will only show if that page is indexed.

There are quite a few tools out there for finding out how many backlinks you have and where they come from, but it is better to hear it from the horses mouth – we want to know what how many links Google thinks are pointing at our site.

Well, Google’s Webmaster Tools allow you see that. Once you have verified that you own a site (by uploading an html file to your server or including a special meta tag in your index page) you can view how many links to your site Google has indexed. (You also need a Google account)

The results are very interesting and a lot more useful than the inaccurate Link: operator available in Google search.

As well as showing the total number of external links to your site, the tool breaks them down to show which pages within your site they are pointing at, where they are coming from and the date they were last found. (Using this I’ve found a few directories that provide multiple links from one submission because of search results pages that are indexed).

You can also view a similar display for the internal link structure of your site. The number of internal links to a page helps Google rate the relative importance of pages within a site. Seeing it displayed this way helps to highlight problems in your internal link structure.

All this data can be downloaded. You could combine it with other data such as the pagerank of your site’s pages and the pages linking to them for a more thorough analysis.

You can also upload and check sitemaps, check your robots.txt file, view search queries for your site and other stuff I haven’t fully understood yet.

This tool is a must for anyone wanting to understand how Google crawls and interprets your site.

Find out more about it at: http://searchengineland.com/070205-165836.php

This is a useful bookmarklet that I use when submitting to directories, looking for link exchanges and checking my own site. A Bookmarklet is a little snippet of javascript which you can add to your browser in the form of a bookmark (Firefox) or favourite (Explorer).

It requests the cached page in Google for the web page you are currently viewing. Useful to check if the web page has been crawled by Google and when it was last crawled.

Click and drag the following link to your toolbar or right click and add to your bookmarks or favourites: Google Cache