Just wanted to start on a thread on the subject of internal 301 re-directs. What's been your general experience when re-directing a page or set of pages to the "canonical" or new version? How long have the engines taken to catch up?
For us, I've noticed that Google takes between 2 and 6 weeks to recognize and properly index, although the rankings seem to follow fairly directly (so links must be re-directing, too). For MSN, it's a bit shorter - 1-3 weeks depending on the site. Yahoo! can take the longest, with between 4-8 weeks being standard, although there are exceptions on bigger sites.
External 301s is a different story - the engines (except MSN) are terrible about catching up with those.
In my experience our 301 redirects were picked up faster when 1. We did a lot of internal linking to the new pages (& got rid of all linking to old URLs) and 2. Either external events or marketing drove a lot of traffic to the new pages.
I guess the hastle and wait of redirects going through is best avoided by carefully planning your url namings in the beginning...
This thread was very helpful in pointing out some different opions in regards to 301's which we are currently in the middle of performing. Thanks to everyone for your thoughts
I have recently been going back through all of my clients and doing internal 301's to the www. and all have had positive reactions from the engines. I have seen the same response time as Rand, MSN right away (but they never had a problem indexing the right page in the first place) Google next which has helped tremedously, and Yahoo last to the tune of months.
I had 3 sites that all lost their ranks in december from Google indexing the non www. and now all are back or better.
I did 301s on a website for pages that had exactly the same content but with a new design (don't ask me why they didn't just change the old ones). The old pages where nearly all indexed in Google, Yahoo & MSN so i tried to check how long it would take for the search engines to replace these old pages. Result is : - MSN was the fastest with all pages replaced one week later. - Yahoo is second with all pages replaced one month later - Google is still trying to figure what to do...He now (3 months later) has more old pages indexed than he ever had and still has the same number of new pages he had 1 month later.
My tests were all done on Google.fr, Yahoo.fr & MSN.fr since the website is in french. You can chech this graph if you want to see the evolution of old and new pages in the SEs.
Sunny - great information and a nice graph, too. It's interesting to see experiences from other countries - the search engines definitely do not have the same spidering and indexing patterns worldwide (yet).
I find it interesting to see the number of old pages droping in Google and seeing that the new ones aren't indexed. The two other SEs really replace the old pages while Google seems to be waiting for something before replacing the pages and just drop the old ones.
I have had similar experiences to those already posted. It takes a few weeks to a month for the redirect to be indexed. The rankings from the previous URL are carried over almost right away. There is a bit of a lag. Using a 301 has proven,in my experience, to be the fastest, surest way to move URLs.
My experience from the domain transfer expirement showed that MSN is the early adopter with no problems. Yahoo! has a problem with keeping current. Each time it does a roll-back it goes to the old version (my suspicion is that this is a big part of how they claimed to have the largest index a while ago - many of their pages were old deleted files or redirected "duplicates"). I also have pages that were removed or redirected over two years ago that Yahoo! still says are around. Google is getting better and from what I've heard about the big daddy update they have made some steps in the right direction but still have a way to go to get this relatively simple process working right. What I've found with Google is that links to the old place will confuse the process and often make it start over. Unfortunately in my case the old pages had some really powerful domains linking to them (including .edus) and somehow a couple spammers got the URLs and keep linking to the old stuff throwing things back. I ahve used Google Alerts to help me track this. But every time things start moving to the new stuff, a new batch of links pushes Google back to the old stuff. There is a bit of speculation on this "theory" but considering the timing of events it's really the olny thing that makes sense to me. My advice is get some really strong links to the new URLs to give Google even more incentive to straiten itself out.
I am new to playing around with this but I am finding that sometimes it's just better to delete an existing page if you have the 404 set.
When I did the 301 to "www" I lost some rank that was a little sad.
Once I set the 404's and 301's my blogs started to climb out of the box, I believe that 99% of the perceived issues are often technical. Engines are really stupid and just do not get it without help.
I am not that anal, I do not monitor time, sorry.
I use them quite often internally. Google and MSN pretty quick to pick them up and apply the ranking to the new page. A few weeks at most, I would guess. Not really any negative effect from 301ing internally at all.
Yahoo is another story completely. I still have pages in Yahoo that were redirected about 2 years ago. Old pages are blocked with robots.txt but Yahoo still doesn't care. Personally I think that Yahoo's relevancy is so poor that I have completely stopped using them.