New Posts Indexed While Old Posts Are Not

I did a 301 redirect from my blog not using the www prefix to using the prefix and since then my indexed pages dropped drastically. It is now about 1 month since i did the redirect.

Before the redirect, i had about 100 posts indexed but after the redirect i had about 12

I have since done a lot of things to get Google to re-index the old posts without much success. I have pinged my sitemap, submitted my sitemap to some high social authority sites, re-submitted my sitemap to Google, continued to update my blog, inserted sitemap link on home page of my blog, indicated preferred domain in webmaster tools etc but only notice a slight improvement in indexing, to about 22 posts.

I however observe that each new post i make is swiftly indexed.

What can i do to get my old posts re-indexed.

 

Have you updated the very same in Google webmaster tools as well

 

Thank you kefutiwi for your comment.

Yes, i have updated same in google webmaster tools.

 

Well why don't you copy and paste your old posts as new ones, wait till they're indexed, then go to the database and change the dates of the posts back to what they were before?

Might seem like a long-winded way to do it, but it will solve your problem.

 

Thanks Biggy Bop for your comment.

It sounds a good idea but i know that that is a classic case of duplicate content, especially occurring on the same site and it is unlikely Google will index it for that reason. In fact, one may even get penalized.

My research so far seems to be leading me to the conclusion that it is because i syndicated articles on my blog to the article directories, though after being posted on my blogs and indexed by Google, that i now have a problem of re-indexing since those article directories still have the same articles indexed by Google in their name.

A variant of your suggestion which i may try for one post first and see how it goes, is to first save it elsewhere on my system, delete the old post, first and then copy it into a new post. That way, at worst Google will not index the post, but no penalty will result.

The disadvantage to that however is that it would be looked upon as fresh content by Google and the article directories that already have the content indexed will be prioritized as the owners of the work and in fact mine may therefore still not be indexed.