How long to reindex site whose redirects had been broken?

[cyc0]

Hi guys

We had an issue with redirects that went unnoticed for approx 6 months, basically, Google wasn't going beyond the initial URL that was redirected and never hit the new destination.

I have since removed the offending 301 redirects and have done some house cleaning to ensure all 404's are redirected to appropriate locations (strangely these are being followed). My question is, how long can I expect it to take to re-index a forum with approx 500k threads? up until this issue, we've had a great presence in search results - currently, we have only about 5k pages listed.

thanks

[tangor]

Run a new sitemap and resubmit to expedite the process. How long? Hard to say, depends on site size, etc. But look to at least seven days to see results you can actually track.

[keyplyr]

How long to reindex site...

Pages are indexed, not sites. The more backlinks to those pages, the more Googlebot will find those pages.

I agree about resubmitting sitemap.xml.

[tangor]

site size does count as regards the crawl budget any SE will expend on any visit. The Sitemap will clearly suggest WHICH PAGES to visit on the site.

[Robert Charlton]

have done some house cleaning to ensure all 404's are redirected to appropriate locations (strangely these are being followed)

Can you provide more detail on what you mean by this? Not all 404s should be redirected.

For urls that have no pages to replace them, a 404 is perfectly natural, though if they're intentional you might prefer a 410. If they were urls that shouldn't have gone 404, then yes, redirection would be proper. But don't do things like redirect expired pages to home.

[cyc0]

Hi there

The 404's are mostly old URLs that have been linked to over the years. I've redirected them to the new urls the threads are now located at.

SItemap has been submitted. GB has been hitting it 10-20k times per day since the weekend.

thanks

[lucy24]

to ensure all 404's are redirected to appropriate locations (strangely these are being followed)

If you meant “strangely Google is following redirects just like a human” that’s been their behavior for several years. When the Googlebot meets a redirect, it follows it up almost right away, unless the target URL has coincidentally already been crawled within the last few hours. (I haven't read this in an Official Source. It's just personal observation.)

It sounds as if you are redirecting appropriately. Ideally, URLs that used to exist should never return a 404. If the content is now to be found at a different URL, that's a 301. If the content has been removed entirely, that's a 410. If nothing else, Google stops requesting URLs a lot faster if they return a 410.

Reminder: Although you can't redirect from a fragment, you can easily redirect to a fragment. This is sometimes appropriate--and useful to humans--when several former URLs have been combined into one.