Site in Google Supplemental index, help needed

[Jupiter]

A little over five months ago we optimised an ecommerce site. The site has been built with OScommerce and each database page has automatically generated tag fields so that each page has a unique title, description and keyword tags.

Five months on the site is doing OK in MSN and Yahoo and is nowhere to be found in Google. I just checked the site in Google and I can see that for the domain http://siteurl.co.uk, Google can see 1,220 pages (site has 300 tops), but all of them are in the supplemental results. A search for site:http://www.siteurl.co.uk returns just the home page of the site, again in the supplemental results.

I enquired about this in the past and was told that the problem could have been that there were (supposedly) two versions of the site. There was, of course, only one version, but I was told that the problem was that the site worked for both http://siteurl.co.uk and http://www.siteurl.co.uk. If someone entered the site by typing http://siteurl.co.uk then all the pages of the site were rendered without the www in the url. If someone entered the site by typing http://www.siteurl.co.uk then all the pages of the site were rendered with the www in the url.

This was immediately corrected and now every single page on the site is by default rendered with the www in the url.

If someone types in http://siteurl.co.uk they arrive at the homepage with URL: http://siteurl.co.uk, but once they click anywhere they are redirected to http://www.siteurl.co.uk.

I just checked and the pages still work without the www. By that I mean that the page for product ALPHA has the following url: http://www.siteurl.co.uk/category1/ALPHA. If the www is manually deleted, the page is still displayed with the following url: http://siteurl.co.uk/category1/ALPHA. The only way, however, to render a page without the www in the url is to go to that page, manually delete the www from the url and press enter. That renders the page without the www in the url. If you click refresh the page is still presented without the www, but by clicking on a link to any other page the new page is rendered with the www in the url.

I have seen this in other sites as well, but it does not seem to cause any problems.

I really can not see why the site is listed in the supplemental index. It does not have tons of unique content, but at the end of the day it is an online store and there a limit to how much you can say when describing a garment. We have successfully optimised oscommerce sites in the past, so I don’t think it is the oscommerce engine either.

For reference Yahoo can see 15 pages (half static, half dynamic) for www.siteurl.co.uk and 14 for siteurl.co.uk, whilst msn can see 36 pages for www.siteurl.co.uk and 62 for siteurl.co.uk.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

P.S.

[glengara]

*I really can not see why the site is listed in the supplemental index*

Could be a duplicate content problem between the www and non www pages, usual response is to 301 the non to the www pages.

On the other hand, www.siteurl.co.uk doesn't tell us much :-)

<added>

*Google can see 1,220 pages (site has 300 tops)*

Now that may be significant, sounds like G is finding a number of Urls that point to the same page, = duplicate content.

[mdsouza]

In addition to using a 301 redirect look at the pages in the supplemental index for pages that contain session id's, then check oscommerce for the add-on to remove session ids' if they are causing any of the duplicate content pages.