g1smd - 6:02 pm on Aug 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

In an ideal world, the various site searches should show all pages as www and no pages as non-www URLs.

In practice, many sites will show a selection of both www and non-www URLs. The aim here is maximise the number of www pages listed, and maximise the number of listed www pages that are not supplemental.

The number of non-www pages listed as supplemental is totally irrelevant. As long as non-www URLs redirect to their equivalent www pages for live pages and return a 404 error for pages that no longer exist, then all is well with the site. Google will hang on to those types of supplemental results (URLs that redirect or are gone) for a year or more. You cannot alter that. Don't bother measuring them.

Every page of a normal site has the current content as a normal URL, and the older version of the same page is stored as a supplemental result. You see the supplemental result when you search for older content that used to be on the page, but no longer is. You cannot change this.

For a site with duplicate content, then none, some, or all URLs for that same content will be normal results and none, some, or all alternative URLs will be shown as supplemental results. Aim to get all non-canonical URLs deindexed. What is left will be a mixture of normal and supplemental results. Let Google reindex the site. It will take a while for the supplemental status to be lifted for the remaining URLs.

The "nonsense" searches like site:www.domain.com -inurl:www (show all www pages that do not have a www in the URL) show non-www URLs whatever their status is, and www URLs that have a supplemental tag for at least one version of the cached content.

Some sites return zero for some of the searches. Those are the ones that have perfect canonicalisation. Most others show many anomolies.

The take away here is to measure how many normal www results there are, not how many supplemental or non-www results there are.

Umm, "the take away here is..."; jeez I'm starting to sound like Matt Cutts. Oi! Google! Stop messing with my mind...