Testing the Google 404 widget with canonical problems.

[Broadway]

I've just installed the use of Google's 404 widget on my site's 404 page.

I was just experimenting with it so to see the different types of "Other things to try" results that it serves.

At one point I was testing how it handled subdirectory misspellings, such as:

domainname/product/pagename
domainname/products/pagename (misspelling, products instead of product)

Side Bar -
I host on a Windows server. Early on (years ago) I was inconsistant with page name capitalization. I have since, repeatedly, tried to clean up this mistake, including about a month and a half ago placing a rel="canonical" tag on each and every page.

In the test above with the misspelled subdirectory but correctly spelled and capitalized pagename, the Google widget serves up two "Other things to try" pages:

The first is:
domainname/product/pagename
(this page with this capitalization style does exist on my server)

The second is:
domainname/product/PageName
(One of the historic mis-capitalized spellings I had used some years ago. This page, with this capitalization style, does not exist on my server, nor has it for many years)

Is this evidence that Google still sees both spellings of this page as different pages (despite the use of the rel="canonical" tag)? I would assume the source of this error is in-comming links with the mis-capitalization?

[edited by: tedster at 5:53 pm (utc) on Oct. 6, 2009]
[edit reason] change specific product to the generic word [/edit]

[tedster]

Somewhere in their back office data storage, I'm sure Google has a record of every URL they ever spidered. You can see googlebot retrying positively ANCIENT addresses every once in a while, just to see if there's any new signs of life, I guess.