Supplemental index and "more quality backlinks"

[billshorters]

I read a post by Adam Lasnik from Google in the Google Webmaster Help Group on the supplemental index. He said that the way to bring pages out of the supplemental index into the main index is to "Get more quality backlinks. This is a key way that our algorithms will view your pages as more valuable to retain in our main index".

If you have thousands of product pages from your site in the supplemental index how in practice to you get them all "...more quality backlinks"?

[tedster]

My take on what Adam said is to combine it with what Matt Cutts also has said recently about Supplemental pages being connected to low PR.

PR comes from quality inbound links, but PR is also "circulated" within a site. It doesn't just get voted in through a link and then stop dead at the target page. So "more quality backlinks" doesn't mean that every internal page needs IBLs -- that's not realistic as you've noted.

But more quality backlinks pointing to key pages does make sense. And then that new PR power can circulate throughout the site via a solid linking structure. This understanding aligns the comments made by two of Google's visible spokespeople.

[Marcia]

It's also a matter of pruning internal links and being selective about which pages and parts of a site should be linked to from where.

[derekwong28]

I have a PR7 site whose every page is in the supplemental index except the homepage. The content is pretty unique since it is a forum.

Getting my sites to be indexed beyond the frontpage and ensuring that the other pages are in the main index is now a much more important issue for me than the actual rankings.