Leave links to 301d URLs until Google crawls them?

[DiscoStu]

I have a couple of pages that are only linked to from the homepage. I need to change the urls so I'm going to 301 those links to point to a new folder. Should I leave the old links on the homepage until Google crawls them and sees the 301s, or should I change them out to the new updated links immediately?

[TheMadScientist]

Personally, I usually leave them until they're crawled and haven't had any issues, but YMMV.

[jdMorgan]

Leave the old-URL links for a couple of crawls -- The spiders must fetch the old URLs in order to to receive the 301 responses.

However, leaving a link on your own site to a redirected URL on your own site also looks kind of like a mistake to the search engines, and they'll likely flag it as such in their Webmaster Tools reports. But if there are no other links to those old URLs, and you cannot arrange to create alternate links to those old URLS on some other page (e.g. from your your HTML site map page), then you don't really have a choice... Just wait for a couple of crawl cycles or until you start to see Webmaster Tools error reports about links to redirected resource, and then update your on-page links.

If you rush this and 'orphan' those URLs, they will likely live on for a long time in the search results, possibly changing to "URL-only" listings after awhile.

Jim

[tedster]

Well, my mileage definitely varies on this one.

I always change internal links the minute I change a URL and haven't had problems. And if the old URL does hang around for a while, I don't see the problem with that, either. The traffic, if there is any still gets to the right destination.

And in this case, those legacy URLs were linked from the home page. Googlebot is very likely to request them again in a timely fashion and get the 301 response. They don't need to see a current link to a legacy URL in order to crawl it. As long as they've already got it in the index, they'll keep checking it out.

[DiscoStu]

Thanks for the replies. My worry is that if the bot finds the new URLs, containing the same content as the old URLs, before finding the 301s it might consider that entire section of URLs a duplicate of the old indexed URLs - possibly causing problems with getting the new set of URLs properly indexed.

But like Tedster said, it might be fine since they will revisit the old URLs from their indexed version of the homepage and see the 301s...

[steveb]

Leave the old links up till the old URLs fall completely out of the index.

It's a critical error to have to new pages found as duplicate content, and let the old URLs linger on endlessly in the index.