How long does google digest major changes?

[borishar]

Hey guys,

I am going to make some major changes to my website, as described in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

Lot's of 301s to consolidate 3–4 pages in to one. Trying to recover from Panda.

The question is this:

How long should I expect google to digest and settle with the new change. I wan't to know whether or not the change was a success. I have an ability to go back to the previous version of the website in instant, but before I do that, I need to be sure.

For example, if 2 weeks after the change the website is at half the traffic it was, I want to know whether or not the changes in serp are in progress or are they done?

To help you out, I'd like to mention that my website gets visited by google bots daily. Articles I have, appear in SERP the same day.

Thank you!

[aristotle]

If you're making these changes to try to improve your website, then why would you change back later to a previous design that you don't think is as good?

[goodroi]

It can take Google anywhere from about a day to over a year to digest a big change.

If you have a popular website that is being crawled each day and you make a change to impact their regular algorithm, you can see an impact the next day. If you are making a change to impact a special subset of the algorithm (things like panda & penguin) you might need to wait for Google to manually re-run that special subsection. Not all parts of the Google ranking algorithm are fully automated or run everyday.

aristotle brings up a really good point. Why would you ever revert to something that isn't as good?

[RedBar]

I agree with goodroi, it's almost impossible to give a timescale, I've seen revamped sites have everything up and running as normal in a couple of weeks, I've seen others take at least 6 months and others get nowhere whatsoever.

You suggest that you must have a popular site if articles are uploaded and appear on a daily basis therefore I would say that you'll know pretty quickly.

[aakk9999]

The important thing with such change is that there is no technical error in execution. The worst results are if you do the change and then revert some URLs (e.g. mistakenly redirected), add some new URLs (mistakenly missed from redirect), change target to some redirected URLs (mistakenly redirected to wrong place), mistakes with canonicals (point to URL that redirects), with noindex, etc.

Getting these right the first time round can definetely help in Google processing changes faster and reduces ranking drop risk.

[borishar]

Thanks guys! The change is not design related. It is more about consolidating few pages in to one, which theoretically is the right thing to do, but who knows.