Development Site probably cause of Supplemental Mess

My dev site was accidentally found and duplicated the content

[saucey]

I'm sure there are other reasons that could have helped with the nightmare that I find myself in but...

We had a development site on a sub-domain where changes were made and then copied to the "real" site. We've been doing it this way for years for other sites and it has never been a problem. Well, a link slipped somewhere a long the way and the dev site got spidered. As the real site is totally unique content (well, except for the dev site), I was surprised at first to see that it had obtained supplemental status on A Lot of the 1000's of pages.

I'm desperately looking for the best way to handle this problem. The dev site has been removed. Are there any other avenues that I can explore to help fix this nightmare? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[Jordo needs a drink]

The first thing you should probably do is fix the robots.txt on your dev sites. You shouldn't be allowing the bots to crawl them.

[saucey]

Yes, that was quickly done. Good point and one that was just "missed" a long the way some how. :(

[Patrick Taylor]

It possibly isn't as much of a nightmare as it feels. Surely, if/when you have decent incoming links to the real site (all other things being equal) Google will correct its index quite quickly.

[tedster]

The timing of your issue may make it more challenging to understand your full situation for a while. Note that some sites are seeing odd, apparently new behavior with the Supplemental Index.

[webmasterworld.com...]

So you've done what you should do, I'd say. I'd suggest letting things sort out for a bit.