In case you haven't been noticing, the Big Daddy update is causing a lot of sites to have all of their pages, except the index page, go supplemental. There is a big thread over at WMW about it. If this problem is affecting you, before you panic too much, be sure to read DaveAtIFG's response (msg #123). It may or may not be the actual truth, but it is logical and level-headed. An excerpt of his post:
The key thing to remember is that BigDaddy is being deployed to resolve canonical problems. I suspect sites are going supplemental down to the home page to identify the canonical domain. Then the site is respidered and rebuilt in Google's index using "new infrastructure," revised code that better handles canonical issues.
People have even starting commenting on Cutt's blog, hoping to get a response from him about the problem, but so far, Google is being mum about it. I'll let you know if I hear anything concrete.
UPDATE: Googleguy has finally chimed in on the subject in the afore-mentioned thread (msg 160). He says:
I'm happy to ask someone to check this out. Please send an email to sesnyc06 [at] gmail.com with specific domains and the keyword "gonesupplemental". I have a theory about this, which I'm asking the crawl/index guys to check out, but I'll need 5-10 specific examples to check if my theory holds. If my guess is right, I'll try to get the crawl/index folks to get things back to the previous behavior.
So, if you are having this problem, follow those directions, and things may get solved.
I’ve been reading this more and more lately, so I decided to check… Specifically, I checked on a hobby/test site that had all but the index page in the sup results for the last 3-4 months.
Sure enough, every indexed page was out of the supplemental results. Good times. Let’s just hope this bizzarro world stays this way for a little while. 😉
Robert, note that I added an update to this post at about the same time you commented. Just in case you missed it.
Thanks, DD – that must have come just after I viewed the entry. And for those webmasters in my vertical, please disregard above advice. 😉
Actually, we got a pretty strong link recently for that site, and I would imagine that’s part of the reason for getting out of the sup’s.
Hmm…. Our big site seems to have had this happen as well. Only the index page shows as non-sup. But there’s an odd twist – there are some pages that don’t show up anywhere in site: or allinurl: right now, yet those pages are still ranking in the SERPs (and are not “supplemental”).
I’m not bright enough to know what that means, but it must mean something…