I was happy to see that Matt Cutts posted an article about Google’s infrastructure updates. Most importantly the one talking about Supplemental Results, an area that most SEO’s believe is a sign of a penalty. Like many search engines one giant database with a ton of content in it is just not logical and too expensive. Thus having a second or third database with additional content, makes a lot of sense. You can slice it up any way you want to look at it, but now that they are going to surface these results more often we may have much less to worry about.

The following question still remains in my mind, if you are competing in a highly competitive space. Would it make sense for Google to blend in supplemental results within this type of search? My general thought is no, you would only see the benefit if the results are tail or less competitive. But we won’t really know until it happens.

For the most part I have ignored the Supplemental Results and the useless information and predictions on why it’s happening and how it’s the end of the world. It looks like when you examine the supplemental results with a fine tooth comb, you can notice one major factor. A lot of this content is duplicate content; I am seeing this on a large range of sites.

This raises the question, how different do you need to make each site to rank well. I get the distinct feeling that this is going to become a much larger issues than before within the SEO community. Especially since so many spammers still use the screen scrapper mentality.

I am wondering if anyone else is seeing the same thing?