oddsod - 6:13 pm on Nov 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

Thanks g1smd, I did particularly like your detailed explanation of the canonical problem.

@ Wizard

I cleaned up 301s on one of my sites as well but a site:mysite.com -www still shows up all the old non-www pages as being in supplemental. And it's because Google is not removing them from supplementals is why I think 301 handling is broken at Google.

With respect the home page - same problem. You can 301 it but the old page stays in supplemental and it's more of a problem than dupes of internal pages being stored.

obono, how many times was the wrong URL crawled after the 301? i.e. how many times (and for how long) did Google have to keep hitting the 301 for that page? But, most importantly, what do you get when you do a search for site:yoursite.com -www (if your dup problem was www and non-www versions of the same pages)?

If what I read here is correct, this is a waiting stage till the link is spider one more time to retrieve title and description. At that time, we expect that the 301 will be complete and google will list just one page with no dupes.

That is exactly what I was hoping to read here but don't recall having ever seen any thread that suggested this was the case. On the contrary the suggestions have always been that the old URLs stay in supplementals (as per the link in my OP). I would appreciate if you could point me to any thread that suggests Google handles 301s properly.