How long does it take Google to acknowledge URL changes?

[Marshall]

Eight months ago I moved a client's e-commerece site to a new server and changed the directory paths of its store from a secondary level to the root level (e.g. /store/products to /products) The site use to rank in the top five results for 10 years on Google. Now, however, it's as if it dropped off the internet.

Google is still trying to crawl the old pages even though there's a 301 in place and has the "top" keywords way off even though the page are the same as before. The robots.txt file was changed as was the .xml sitemap (Google has both current copies). Bing has all the changes and the site still ranks in the top five results with them, but Google seems stuck on the old site.

Being this is the first time I encountered this type of drop in search results with this kind of site change, does anyone have any clue or insight as to what the problem might be? Seriously, isn't 8 month long enough for Google to update.

Thanks in advance,
Marshall

[tedster]

You're right - 8 months is too long. Is Google also requesting the new URLs, or only the old ones?

[rainborick]

There's no hard and fast rule here, but Google generally absorbs 301 redirects within a few weeks. They will continue to attempt to crawl those old URLs almost forever, but the frequency should fall off dramatically within a month or two.

So unless your redirects are not working as intended (which I'm sure you've checked dozens of times), your timeline suggests that your site was devalued within the recent Panda update(s). It seems to me that ecommerce sites face a real challenge with Panda because individual product pages can appear to have very thin content to Google, even if they aren't simply copying the manufacturer's descriptions. So I'd suggest that you check into what other people have done to recover from Panda and see how you can apply that information to your site.

[Marshall]

Is Google also requesting the new URLs, or only the old ones?

tedster, they're requesting both. However, from the new site map, it's showing "224 urls, 43 indexed" and it's been that way for a while And yes, I think 8 months is too long.

rainborick, none of the content is copied from the manufacturer or is only copied for key elements, i.e size, color, materials. Otherwise, it is all original. The 301's are working and I have thought it might be a Panda thing.

Ironically, the site has several pointer domains with key words in the domain name and in Google's search results, they score really high though, obviously, the pages are not unique: original_domain/products results page 4, pointer_domain/products results page 1 #5. Go figure. The only thing I can think of is that the pointer domains were added after the site was moved.

It's frustrating I guess is the bottom line.

Marshall

[rowtc2]

Check headers (Fetch as Googlebot in WMT) to see if is indeed a 301 code for old pages.

I have made some 301 redirect few weeks ago and things are fine, in search results are displayed the new URLs.

[ascensions]

They notice them in a week for me, then they regress, infusing old data. Google has some sort of Darwin Algo going. URL's are acting like genes, often recessive for almost a year, and may show up in the results.

Then again, maybe it's just me and I broke Google.

[g1smd]

I am working with a site that had 301 redirected many URLs in April and May. In September a few of the old URLs still appear in the SERPs.

The number is dropping and has done so with a gap of a week or two between each reduction.

Eight months is way too long - unless you started with tens or hundreds of thousands of URLs.

Make sure your sitemap lists only the new URLs. Make sure that the 301 redirects are single step, not in a chain.