One very interesting tidbit I learned from attending the recent pubcon / webmaster world search conference was listening to matt cutts explain how to get a site out of the supplemental listings.
Supplemental search engine result positions ( SERPs ) are often seen with very large, new websites. These sites often times have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pages listed.
Generally, these sites are databases of content which have been published online.
Sometimes the content could be very valuable – for instance – if an academic journal decided to publish an archive of their article abstracts online. This might add 30,000 new pages onto the web overnight – all of which would be very unique and valuable content.
Other times, these database websites are not very valuable. The worst case might be an automated scraper site which mangles the content in a way that reads like jibberish. In a situation like this, a blackhat webmaster might publish an almost unlimited number of pages (limited only by the size of database storage at his disposal). This kind of content is basically garbage, and would surely frustrate anyone who clicked across this in a search engine listing.
At the conference, some webmaster asked ‘how can i get my very valuable website out of the supplemental listings?’. I was a little bit surprised in how Matt Cutts replied to this.
Basically, he replied that when a site is showing up in the supplemental listings, it’s an indication that the site does not have enough backlinks coming to it. If the site does not have enough backlinks coming to it – this would be an indication that the site was still lacking trust or reputation in it’s niche.
I consider this interesting because Cutts is basically advocating proactive link building in this case. Building up links which would not develop naturally – rather links that would require the site webmaster to go out and solicit for others to link back to this site.
I suppose the rational behind his recommendation is that – if people really consider that your site is garbage – they would never bother to link back to your site anyway (who would want to link to such a scraper site described above?). Thus – webmaster that links back to your large database website is a webmaster who is voting that your database is adding value to the internet.
At the Webmaster World conference there were also several references to a Google Quality Rank Score (which must be something like Trustrank). There has already been a publically discussed Google Quality score which is used for Google Adwords – to determin how well an advertisement listing and landing page convert into leads for advertisers. But in this case, I think the Google Quality Rank Score discussed at the conference was actually something different – maybe something that encompasses all of the different quality factors, as mentioned on Matt Cutts’ blog and in the Google Patent listing. These quality factors include things like:
site age, document age, domain factors (how old the domain is, how long it is under the same ownership, domain name class – .edu, .org, .info, .com, .gov – hypens in the url?, etc), internal linking, external linking (how trustworthy are the sites your site links to?), link stability (are the links long lasting?), frequency of updates, affiliate links, bad words, backlinks, site penalities (cloaking, hidden text, bad linking, etc).
Posted by Danny 
