Odd url showing up in Google Search results

[watercrazed]

When I do a widget site:www.mydomain.com search in get 2 urls returned www.mydomain.com/widget.htm and www.mydomain.com//widget.htm - supplemental

In fact there seem to be a lot of them, any ideas how they got there and how to get rid of them? I don't have any files that start with a /filename.htm in my directory.

[tedster]

A number of people, including me, have noticed those odd double-slash urls showing up. If they are only supplemental and the real url is in the index, there's nothing to worry about.

Also, in a recent interview with the Google sitemap team, they were asked about how to remove bad urls from the supplemental index. They basically said not to worry -- that the supplemental index will gradually purge itself over a long period of time. They had nothing to say about ways to speed the process -- I got the impression that we can't get those urls removed ourselves.

The only time supplemental listings should raise an alarm, IMO, is when a large number of the site's real URls start showing as supplemental. In the past, this has usually been a sign that there's a technical problem on the site. Perhaps a URL rewrite function is misfiring, a "custom 404" page is not serving a true 404 header, something like that.