Matt Cutts of Google Discussing SEO: Session 6

Contributed by MickeyMouse August 1, 2006  
Tagged: Google

Matt discusses a bit about google’s supplemental results. He discusses why sometimes the search estimates in the supplemental results are inaccurate and why 301 redirects take a long time to appear correctly in these results.

Reference: video clip 6

Supplemental results have been a foggy issue since they were first released about three years ago. Matt answers a few questions about them…

Why are result estimates for supplemental results using special operators such as “site:” and “intitle” so far off the predicted results?

These type of searches are “off the beaten path”; therefore, it is not high yield to make these specialized search estimates more accurate. Webmasters should not worry about the discrepancy. Two recent changes to the infrastructure may start making these estimates closer to real values in the future.

Increasing the precision of specialized search estimates with special operators are not high yield to google at this time.

A user asks why normal 301 redirects within a site take a long time to point to the corrected URL.

Matt says that there are a normal googlebot and a supplemental results googlebot. The supplemental bot grabs a ton of additional information but spiders more slowly that the normal googlebot. Since it updates more slowly, the redirects will take longer to appear correctly in those results.

The changes in infrastructure that Matt alluded to earlier will soon allow the supplemental results to be fresher.