g1smd - 11:25 am on Sep 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hmm, I am just looking at a website with 170 live pages. A Google site:domain.com search returns 178 www pages. Every result has a unique title, and shows a snippet that describes that page. Each "page" is indexed just once under its canonical URL. There are no supplemental results for any current "live" content pages, and no duplicate content problems. The site ranks for the words that were targetted; the correct or a close page (to what we guessed would be returned) comes up for searches. Google delivers traffic, and punters are buying the products.

A year ago, things were not like that, but following a checklist of half a dozen items, and many months later, all is well. In fact all the www pages were fully listed within a month. It just took a year for the redirected non-www stuff to drop out, and it was only a few months ago that a few dozen duplicate meta descriptions were noted and corrected.

The amount of time spent working on the site to fix all of those problems was less than two hours.

There are half a dozen Supplemental Results for some old product pages that were deleted a few months ago. Those return a 404 status, and a custom error page with full site navigation on. Google will drop them later. For now they still bring a small number of visitors who might buy something else. Those are the only supplemental results. That is not a problem.

The Supplememtal Results are listed last in the list in a site search.

Just checking again, and there is one Supplemental Result for a "live" page. It had a duplicate meta description, that was fixed a few months ago, but the page has a cache date from 2005 October. One link directly to that page from somewhere else will probably get that fixed.

A site:www.domain.com -inurl:www search lists ONLY the www Supplemental results; those that are for the various 404 URLs as noted above, and an extra TWO that represent "historical" www data for pages that are still "live". Those two www Supplemental Results are for some of the pages that have had their meta descriptions recently amended. All of the others that were amended have already lost their Supplemental status and appear ONLY in the normal index. Just these two still appear in both indexes at present.