DaveAtIFG - 12:54 am on Sep 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

>no one really seems to have a definitive explanation or a solution

Agreed. Let me clarify a few things and offer an informed opinion.

It's not clear from your posts if you are using a 301 from non-www to www or vice-versa. It's also not clear if you are using absolute addressing or a <base> tag on your pages.

Both GoogleGuy and Matt Cutts (in his blog) have been adamant that 301s are the way to avoid "canonical page problems" and I suspect this is largely behind the problems you've experienced.

Observations and opinions: I have several sites experiencing unexpected results using 301s that were implemented this year and there are several threads running presently discussing similar problems. IMHO, Google fixed the 302/pagejack problem and induced a glitch in 301s, or perhaps they simply unmasked an underlying glitch. In any event, I brought both the problems with my sites and a thread discussing the 301 problem to GoogleGuy's attention circa 8/23. He agreed to revisit/review 301 handling and, in my experience, he is a man of his word. I'm confident 301 handing will be resolved in the next update, and I don't believe there is much webmasters can do about 301 handling until then.

If you don't already, you should have your redirects in place before that update, in preparation. Your site may have "sandbox" issues as well, but having both non-www and www versions listed (canonical page problem) splits PR between them and may trigger duplicate content penalties, so my advice is to fix what you can, wait for the update, and then deal with any lingering "sandbox" issues.

In nine years of building sites, I've never experienced a pagejack or a canonical page problem if I used absolute addressing and a 301 to consolidate domain variations. The sites giving me problems currently are recently built client sites and I just have to wait it out like everyone else...