Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant

Relocation experiment on the cards. Ever since I tried to sell my old house in 2002 using the web and enjoyed the 'Can weblogs?' enthusiasm of Tim Ireland, the page that hosted it on my site has continued to perform marvellously for searches for Bromley and Orpington related property. It does really well in image searches such as Bromley Houses for Sale and this one, which is my personal favourite, a global image search for an '8 bedroom house'.

Somewhat half-heartedly I tried to commercialise the traffic a couple of years ago, but I have been too busy to really make it work. So I have decided to put it on a separate domain www.bromley-property.co.uk (apologies for the horrid 123-Reg holding page) and see if I can sell it to someone who can make more of it.

Two challenges arise: 1. Can I protect the relevance of these pages by simply 301 redirecting the requests for the pages on Johnston.co.uk to the new domain? The theory says 'yes', but I have my doubts as it is a brand new domain with no history, as far as I can tell, and I have only registered it for two years. And 2. Can I actually sell the site? On that front, you need to know that the site receives approximately (ahem) 450 page views a week, all referred from Google with relevant search expressions (how many weekly customers does a high street estate agent get, I wonder).

The first challenge is the one that really interests me. The second will be a bonus. Watch out over the next week for developments.

Google ebook listing update: After a painfully long week, Google has finally re-spidered the google-ebook.html page on my site, discovered the 301 redirect and replaced the page with the new google-ebook/index.php location. Google's judgement of its relevance has rather nicely climbed a place, displacing the tech-recipes.com result, or rather, it would have done but for a new result from searchenginewatch.com (that isn't a link to the article - it doesn't need any help from me) reporting on a BBC article on Google's plans to sell ebooks (which I will link to).

Between this post and the last one, Google quickly dropped the apparently duplicated page from my site, from the SERPs, preferring the old HTML file, replacing the secondary entry from my site with a blog post about the ebook. With a site search only showing the google-ebook/index.php when you 'repeat the search with the omitted results included'. In fact, at the time of writing, this is still the case; the php file does not appear in the site search, the html file is still there. I expect this search to update shortly.

The frustrating part of this was that Google spidered my blog entry that had the old URL in it, but didn't then seek to spider the old URL again. The main reason is probably that the link was not news on my site so it didn't consider it worthy of an immediate look. Still, job completed, objective reached, onwards and upwards.

Google eBook search update: My new page for my ebook, 50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Web Site, is now in Google (screen grab - 135kb), but oops, spot the deliberate mistake. The original google-ebook.html page is still listed! At first this seems beneficial, because my site now takes up two of the ten front page locations for such a search, however, they are effectively duplicate pages, which is never a good idea.

The mistake I made was in publishing the various links on my site to only to the /google-ebook/ path. Why is that a mistake, you may ask, when that is the new location of the information. Well, it is a mistake, because I am then relying on Google to come and re-spider the google-ebook.html page when it chooses, before it finds the 301 redirect I have in place informing it that the location has changed. In the meanitime, then I have two copies of the same page, which is not a clever thing to do, as Google may be suspicious of my intentions.

The correction is now present in my original post below - a change I made yesterday - in which you will find that the first text entry of the title of my ebook 50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Web Site, is linking not the the /google-ebook/ path, but to the original html file. Google will come along shortly to spider my blog again, and pick up this link, and hopefully re-index it within the next few days.

Oh, and if my first few ebook buyers are reading this, please let me have some feedback when you can.

Happy New Year: Happy New Google eBook. After much faffing around I can finally present my Google eBook: 50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Web Site. It has taken some sweat and tears, to get it to this point, and no doubt some more to keep it updated, but I am positive, from initial feedback, that it is worth reading!

From a practical point of view, it is going to be interesting to see whether I can defend my 4th spot on Google for a "Google ebook" search, as the new page is located at /google-ebook/index.php whereas the previous one was at google-ebook.html. The old location is now serving a 301 redirect - try Dan Winchester's View Source to check the header response. Fingers crossed for a quick and successful re-indexing and a retained position in the SERPs.

Happy reading (sorry it's not free, the kids have to eat, afterall).