Update 10-10-2009: All links to PREFER (http://prefer.hub.ph) are removed. That site no longer exist because PREFR was already indexed by Google as I found out just today.  For the same reason, I will hide the page Expt until such time I need to use it again in an experiment.

I have this one problem, my real estate blog PREFR has never been indexed by Google ever since I started building its XML sitemap, submitting sitemap through Google Webmaster tool and building a few backlinks a month ago. On the other hand, some of my new posts here in Codeleet got indexed just one day after I publish it. This is the first time this happened to me. All of my older websites and my clients' websites got indexed by Google in less than 10 days.

Thinking that maybe, I've been overly aggressive in optimizing that site for search engine (I always submit sitemaps and build backlinks but not in the same day) and Google consequently banned or penalize me. Then I decided to launch another site PREFER, which is exactly the same as PREFR but with fewer backlinks and no sitemap. It's less than one week since I launched PREFER.

My plan is that one of them must be indexed by Google soon, and when that happens, the other one that wasn't index (yet) will be shut down. It is to find out if my apparently over aggressive SEO is the reason why PREFR is not yet indexed.

There are no problems with robots.txt, meta robots or .htaccess file in case you think that's the reason why that site is not getting indexed.

Then, I came up with an idea. Since Google is so fast in indexing the pages and posts of Codeleet, why not copy some of the posts from PREFR/PREFER and publish them here in Codeleet. Then, when those posts got indexed, I'll use 301 redirect to forward the visitor to PREFER or PREFR. Basically, what will appear in search engine is http://codeleet.hub.ph/real-estate-post/ but upon clicking, they will be automatically forwarded to http://prefer.hub.ph/real-estate-post/.

Since 301 means permanent redirect, I was hoping that Google will be forced to index prefer.hub.ph because it's simply a new location of the post that it already indexed.

So I decided to create a new category called "Expt-Real Estate" (ok, I won't link in it as it's not really an official part of Codeleet, but you can access it through the "Expt" link at the footer and I might delete it in the future) where I will put those real estate posts. Then, I configured this theme (the one Codeleet is currently using) so that the category Expt-Real Estate will not appear in the category list and the posts under it will not appear in search results.

Then, I picked two posts from PREFER/PREFR (they have exactly the same content) as pilot test in this little experiment. I copied all the text (but I didn't include the images) and published them as two separate posts in Codeleet with the same title as they have in PREFER/PREFR. I published them under Expt-Real Estate so they don't appear with the other regular Codeleet posts. Then, I created the Expt page (with link at the footer) to serve as an avenue for the search engine spiders to crawl the post.

After 18 hours, I checked if Google already indexed one of the two real estate posts by searching "codeleet residential" (without quotes) in Google. This is what appeared in search results.

Only one of the two real estate posts was indexed by Google so far. It's even on top which is good for this purpose (the indented post is a regular Codeleet post that happen to mention the word "residential").

I made two real estate post because my plan is to redirect one to PREFER and the other one to PREFR. I am not sure when the other posts will be indexed, but at this point, I've decided to setup the 301 redirect for this indexed post to its equivalent in PREFER. I was thinking that PREFER might be "more clean" in the eyes of Google because it's new and I wasn't that aggressive in optimizing it (assuming that my hypothesis is correct).

Then, in less than 30 minutes after I setup the 301 redirect, I searched in Google again the keywords "codeleet residential" and to my surprise, that top most search result was gone. It's now how it looks like.

I didn't know Google is this quick, or is it just a total coincidence? The real estate post in Codeleet that was already indexed is gone in less than 30 minutes. The topmost result now is the one that was indented in the previous search.

So if the real estate post is gone, I thought Google must have already found the 301 redirect and already indexed PREFER. So I searched "site:prefer.hub.ph" (without quote) to see that particular post, or any of the posts/pages in PREFER was already indexed.

The result is still 0.

So for now, I'm not sure what will I do with the PREFER/PREFR websites. I just hope Google will index them soon or I can find out what's preventing them from getting indexed and correct it immediately. I will not push through with this plan on using 301 redirect since it didn't work as expected. Fortunately, I got immediate results.

For now, I will continue building backlinks for PREFER in my usual pace while leaving PREFR on the devices of its sitemap and the backlinks already built for it. I'll also launch another blog, either my personal blog or a photo blog (I'm still not sure which one should be developed first) before this month (October 2009) ends. Should in case this new blog got indexed and neither PREFER nor PREFER still made it in Google, that's the time I'll look into this problem again.

Hmmm! Did you ask Yahoo? I checked it and Yahoo still haven't indexed the real estate posts.

This post is just an interesting observation on the behavior of Google. It is not really useful in itself but might be useful as I gather additional data and observations on the behavior of search engines in the future.