Hi, I'm looking after a large ecommerce site and many of my product pages are appearing in Google supplemental index. Any idea why this could be?
Lack of backlinks to these pages would push them to supplemental results. If you build backlinks to them, they will re-appear in the primary index of google.
I have over a hundred pages in their though (site has thousands of pages) so can't really build links to them all...could it be content or site layout or something?
It can be content as well as layout, difficult to say without looking at your website really. If your navigation is not correctly done, you would end up not passing PR to pages which need them as well and they would end up in supplemental.
pages end up on supplemental results because google sees them as unimportant. This is usually due to lack of content, lack of original content (content already exists elsewhere on the internet) or page is in your sitemap but can't be found by clicking through pages of your site
same title and meta tags will create duplicate prob and that particular page mark as supplemental page
it's because the content is regarded as duplicate, and your version of it is NOT regarded as the 'definitive' version, even it it actually IS your content. Make it unique, kids, make it unique.
Thanks to everyone for the advice. Now that you mention it a lot of the product pages are extremely similar, with not much text content - only the photos differ really.