How Long Does Google Take To Pick Up A 301

Days...Weeks...Months

[webdev]

Does anyone have any indication as to how long Google takes to pick up a 301 redirect to a diff domain.

I have had one on for about 3 weeks but no movement yet on the new one in the index or the old one being dropped although the old one is now experiencing 'slow death' no title description etc...

[johnser]

Have had some serious problems with this since the summer. I then used Bretts recent advice to use a Meta Refresh. Better.

[ThomasB]

Where did Brett give this advice?

[yowza]

I did a 301 in early December. Google dropped all of my pages except the home page.

They started visiting the new site within a week. The redirect was complete within 3 weeks. However, they still haven't gone past my home page.

I had about 200 pages in the index, now I have 1 page.

The spider comes to my site once or twice a day, but doesn't do any digging.

[esaslo]

I can feel you on this. I have a high-level ORG PR 7/8. I recently transistioned the COM to an ORG in the domain address.

The COM SERP remained prevalent in the listings; then, dropping off, the ORG was picked up... ostensibly without any importance at all (going from 1st out of 20 million results, to nowhere at all).

Perhaps it is just a time thing; links needing to be recal'ed, etc.

Thoughts?

[AthlonInside]

Probably 1 week before the the PR/Backlink update shown in one of the google datacenter.

The SERPs are normally shifted 1 week before the new set of PR/Backlink shown.

[andrew_m]

I have a recent experience (end of december) -- redirected a part of a site to a different domain using 301. It took about a week for google's fresh-bot to start showing new URL in search results and rankings did not change as far as I can tell.

[Chris_1]

This is exactly the problem we have had. We went from two mirrored domains (with incoming links to each) and put a 301 on one to the other - TRYING to make Google happy.

Just like yowza - after a few months of basically ZERO listings, we finally have our new index page in the results. However, the googlebot, which stops by daily, IGNORES the rest of the new site that it used to index just fine (when we had the domains mirrored).

I don't know why Google's robot is broken as it is. However, I was VERY glad to hear that Yahoo might drop Google results. We do fantastic on all relevant searches (it's a niche market) for EVERY search engine I know of - EXCEPT google.

A more detailed listing of what has happened:
- we had two domains with incoming links to both (mirrored), businessname.com and business-name.com
- business-name.com was our older domain that was primarily indexed in google - but we wanted to shift to businessname.com
- in september we put a 301 on business-name.com
- very soon google dropped all of our results
- next update google picked up our index page at businessname.com
- there was a huge penalty of sorts applied against our new domain, possibly a "new web site" filter of sorts?
- by end of December our businessname.com site (index page only) is finally scoring as it should
- however, during ALL these months, googlebot has stopped by once or twice a day and checked out our index page, but ignored the entire rest of the site

So, to answer your question. It took until the next update to drop our one domain, but it's been months before our new domain was (index page only) finally in. Some of our issues might stem from the fact that we didn't switch to a completely new domain – and we have yet to see our entire site back into the index.

Sincerely,

Chris

[mcavic]

use a Meta Refresh. Better.

Uh, no.

[keeper]

Quite irritating when Google is publishing [google.com] that this is the way to do it.

Maybe this should be moved to the top of their todo list or the change url advice to have a serious disclaimer.

[mcavic]

- in september we put a 301 on business-name.com
- very soon google dropped all of our results
- next update google picked up our index page at businessname.com

That's how it seems to work. It would be quite nice if Google could replace the url instead of dropping it.

[mbauser2]

Last time I 301'ed to a new domain was in November. Registered the domain on Saturday, uploaded the files on Sunday, set up the redirect on Monday, and Google was showing the new URL by Saturday.

Do you have any normal direct links to the new URL yet? I get the impression (and mind you, I haven't formally tested it) that Google wants to see a direct link before it "believes" a redirect.

[shaadi]

Used 301 for 25 pages as their URL got changed (I know its not good, but it was not avoidable). It took 1 month+ i.e. one deep crawl, one update of the index to reflect the new pages in the index. Position remained the same. Some times ended up have old and new - both URL in the same SERP :)

My site PageRank is 7, and all those pages had PageRank of 6

HTH

[HenryUK]

Hmm, going back a while now but about a year ago I had similar URLs samename.com and samename.co.uk pointing to the same pages. Same pages were indexed under both URLs, the .com got penalised (totally deep-sixed).

Trusting Google and all I read here I put a 301 on the surviving .co.uk redirecting to the .com, and also wrote to Google explaining what had happened and what I had done. Looking back it seems a bit of a gamble!

However it was a seamless transition - in the next update the .co.uk pages were not there, all the .com pages were back, the backlinks for the site had been combined and my PageRank went up accordingly.

Ah, the good old days of early 2003! :-)

[seofreak]

In my case, took about to 3 weeks to index all pages, replace with old ones .. the next update the PR had gone 0 but the SERPS were the same .. so i'm guessing PR update takes a more while.

[Chris_1]

mbauser2 - we have had mixed links to our domains for years. DMOZ lists our newer businessname.com; yahoo shopping directory also lists the businessname.com. Google was sharp enough to realize we had mirrored domains and would actually show ALL backlinks for both domains when we ran a backlink search (and still continues to show a mix of business-name.com and businessname.com links in the backlink search).

HenryUK - that sounds like an idea, but, I agree with you - very risky. The crazy thing is that our business-name.com disappeared rather soon, but a few of the subpages have shown back up in "allinurl" searches. I'm afraid that, if I e-mail them and ask them to drop the hyphenated domain and pick up the other, they will completely ban/drop the hyphenated domain and continue to ignore the new one. In addition, if this isn't fixed in another few months, we'll probably have to try going back to our old method of mirroring the two domains. I can't think of what else we could do. I keep thinking we probably would have had more success if we had switched to a new domain instead of dealing with this mirrored situation...

I feel like we are just another example of someone trying to abide by the rules and getting in trouble for it. I would love to have GoogleGuy’s input on this!

Thanks,

Chris

[Eljaybe]

I have a redirect on my domain that was done late summer of 2003. Still, both domains show in Google. The old one is the only domain I can find when searching for some my top keyword phrases (completely gone for main keyword phrase). It still redirects to the new domain, but how do I get rid of the old domain?
If many sites are still linking to my old domain, could that be why the old domain is still indexed by Google while the new domain is almost impossible to find in the search results?

[Chris_1]

Soon after posting my last message I happened to check the log files for this month.

Lo and behold, googlebot - late last night - actually requested some of the other pages on our site. I'm assuming those pages should begin to appear in the results within the next month or so.

I don't know if it simply happened because of how much time has gone by of if it occured because I mentioned googleguy's name...

This is our current story:
Pre-September 2003: businessname.com and business-name.com mirrored (both have incoming links, both share backlinks, business-name.com was the older one that was primarily listed in the SERP's)

September: 301 from business-name.com to businessname.com - next update ALL our results disappeared from google.

mid-October: businessname.com's INDEX page only was in the SERP's, but didn't score well at all (possibly a "new" content penalty or filter of sorts?)

Several months passed with no apparent activity. Once or twice an alternate datacenter would show our index page as scoring MUCH better (as if the "new" penalty was expiring).

Around Christmas 2003 the businessname.com index page began scoring as it should. However, during all this time the googlebot was ignoring the rest of our site.

January 6th googlebot finally requested additional files from the site...

I'm not sure when the new files will appear, but I would assume they will be back in with the next update.

What is crazy is that none of the other search engines had this kind of trouble making the change...

Hope this helps others that are stuck in the same situation.

Chris

[Eljaybe]

I haven't seen Googlebot in my log files in a long time. Maybe this WebTrends program doesn't track Googlebot? I've been using it now for a few months, and I never see Googlebot as a visiting spider. My hosting company provides WebTrends for me, so maybe they know the answer?

[HenryUK]

Webtrends can be set up to ignore particular spiders, which can be useful if you are trying to measure non-spider traffic. However if you aren't controlling the settings you don't know what is happening.

Ask your ISP about this or get hold of the raw logs and search through them!

H

[Eljaybe]

Thanks for the advice, HenryUK. After searching around I think I found my "raw" logs. They are in a text format, and the good news is I am finding Googlebot showing up in every log so far! So, it seems Googlebot visited my site the last couple days! Maybe that's a good sign?
(Now I know the WebTrends version I have must be ignoring Googlebot for some reason.)

[g1smd]

I managed to swap domains in about a month, back in 2003 June or thereabouts. The old pages remained online, but with a <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> on each one. All of the "internal navigation" links on every page were modified to point to the equivalent pages at the new domain. Google delisted the old site and relisted the new site in a 48-hour period in mid-June.

It took altavista many months to make the change, and alltheweb dropped the old domain after about 5 months, but have never listed the new one, even with about 30 backlinks some of which sites alltheweb already lists.

[getvisibleuk]

so what's the syntax?

PermanentRedirect 301 [newsite.com?...]