Google-Bot Prblem with crawling urlencoded parameters?

?widget%20(3%20of%2055) won't work,?d=widget%20(3%20of%2055) does

[ruserious]

works: page.php?widget%20(3%20of%2055)
doesn't work: page.php?diff=widget%20(3%20of%2055)

As you will notice the only difference is that in the first case the urlencoded stuff is part of the parameter/vaiable and in the second case it's part of the value. I have watched this for 3 updates now: The first page is NOT in the index, the second one is. Problem is: The first one has all the content, the second one only has some meta-information about the page.

The other interesting thing is: The only place the second page is linked from is the first page. That totally confuses me, because it would mean: Google crawled the page, followed the links, but didn't put the page itself in the index. Doesn't make sense to me.

(Sticky me to get the real url, and the search terms)

Is it a bug in Google? Or am I missing something?

[Brett_Tabke]

It is thinking the second is a session id.

[killroy]

you mean the firsat, since he said that google picks up the second one, but NOT the first...

SN

[ruserious]

Well, that's the strange thing. If it had been mistaken as a sessionID, certainly the second one would have had the problem. Bit it was crawled, it is in the index, it even ranks No.1 in the SERPs for the targetted term.

However the first one must have been crawled, but was not added to the index.