How to Find Out How Many of Your eCommerce Store Pages are In the Google Supplemental Index … And How to Fix Them Today!

Is Your eCommerce Site in the Google sandbox?

As you begin to grow your online store by adding more products, new categories, and new supplier product lines, you may get to point…very quickly.. where you have 10,000 or more webpages on your site.

Each of those pages should be treated like valuable currency, as its another potential page for the search engines to find, index, and include in their search results.

One problem thats become epidemic, especially among small business owners operating one or more eCommerce online stores, is that Google has become especially difficult of late and is reportedly including many of these type pages directly into their supplemental index or “sandbox”, which basically makes the pages to NOT be included in their index of searchable pages… which is a MAJOR problem for many eCommerce site owners…

Here’s a quick way to check how many of your eCommerce store’s webpages are in Google’s supplemental index:

Just go to google and type in site:yourwebsitename.com *** -view and you will then see which of your pages are in Google’s supplemental index or “sandbox”.

Wikipedia describes this as :

“Supplemental Result is a supplementary Google search Index of less important web pages according to the Google Page Rank.”

And this is Google’s explanation of supplemental results”

Why do pages end up in the supplemental index?

1) Duplicate content. This is often the main reason a page ends up in the supplemental index. Keep in mind… This refers to “duplicate content” on the SAME SITE…

2) Too many variables (parameters) in the URL. Google mentions this on the “help” page linked up above, and is a typical URL structure of many of the open-source shopping cart apps.

3) Poor overall “link profile”. Matt Cutts from Google specifically mentioned this earlier this year and noted that a recent google algorithm update wouldresult in more supplemental results for “sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.”

4) The page is buried on the site. Orphaned pages (pages with no incoming links, either from internal pages on your site or external pages on OTHER sites) are candidates to go into the supplemental index. These are pages which can only be reached by a deep crawl of your site’s internal links, or pages which can’t be reached at all.

Many search engine optimization experts say that the supplemental results are really Google’s way of filtering out duplicate content. Therefore pages that are modified to contain enough unique content will eventually make there way out of the supplemental index and back into Google’s main index.

When you know which of your pages are in the supplemental index, then you can begin looking for trends among these pages, and develop a plan to get them back into the main index.

Like to know how to get your eCommerce store pages out of Google’s supplemental index?