g1smd - 3:04 pm on Nov 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

A vBulletin forum with 40 000 threads and 40 000 members will easily generate over a million URLs, over 90% of which do not need to be, ummm, should never be, indexed.

Most other CMS, forum, and cart software has the same sort of problems with what they present to search engines.

Your fixes will show a small number of instant (like a few weeks) results, followed by a growing number in the following months. Finger in the air, I would say that you will need at least two Pagerank updates out of the way for most of the problems to be fixed. Anything that turns Supplemental will hang around for a year, but your redirect means that the visitor still gets to see the correct content anyway.

Your measure of success is in making sure that the maximum number of "correct" URLs are properly indexed. Don't be distracted by counting supplemental results for URLs that are now redirects and which fail to go away. They will eventually disappear, and you cannot control how quickly that happens.