To Be or Not To Be (supplemental)

What happens if a url is both supplemental and not at the same time?

[arnarn]

Maybe I'm a newbie at this, but when we talk about supplementals, I always thought we were talking about URLS and how to avoid (duplicate) content and thus avoid supplementals.

On a search today (for two different 2-keyword combinations), I had the same URL show up, once as a supplemental and another time as not a supplemental.

I always thought supplemental applied to the URL, or have I been wrong all this time?

[zeus]

when I doa site: search for my domain I also get a lot of supplemental results, thats why when I do a site search I always us inurl:domain.com that looks much better

[tedster]

In the big thread about Supplemental results (http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3107997.htm [webmasterworld.com]) one of the points covered was that a Supplemental result is not just a url, but actually a url PLUS a cache date. So if the content changes, the older version of the url may hang around as a Supplemental Result even while the newer version is returned as a regular result.

Does that apply in your situation?

[Umbertide]

are you sure they are exactly the same?

we have /Widgets/index.php as supplemental and /widgets/index.php as listd. the only difference being the upper case and lower case W/w

[arnarn]

Well, a bit of time has passed since I made the initial observation and now, no mater what search I try (to get the expected result (URL)), I get the result back as NOT supplemental and NO cache!

The "similar pages" option off of the search result shows 31 similar (almost all different domains except for our home page)

Maybe the cache was/is being updated?

I'll keep trying, but it looks like I can't find the URL as a supplemental result any more.

.. and thanks, tedster, for the link / reminder about the thread on supplementals.