We’ve been playing around with free articles recently in one of our “faux” blogs: The Fishing Rod. Besides free articles, there’s almost nothing else. All we’ve value-added is some comments before and after the articles. And these comments are terribly light on content.

So, why the free articles? Well, we’re doing this as part of an experiment with search engines and free articles. There have been conclusive tests before that have proven that free articles are usually not indexed, and even the originator of the articles could end up being excluded by top search engines like Google and Yahoo! - though MSN seems to be more adept at determining the source of the free articles.

After about a month of posting, and another month of rest, we can report that The Fishing Rod has only had its main page indexed by the search engines. Yes, only one page. The free article permalink pages have completely been avoided. But the once empty Google adverts have begun populating a bit more across all the pages, even though those pages are not shown in the SERPs. We’ve had a few odd advert clicks here and there as well.

In any case, one month is still too short a time period for an experiment such as this one, so we’ll probably be keeping it going for quite a while longer. This means that posting will be restarting soon enough.