How Quickly Will 301 Redirects Kick In?
by Kerry Dean on 11/11/2009 at 1:17 pm in Online Strategies, SEO, SEO Best Practices
In another attempt to pull the curtain back on this blog operation, today I am going to discuss the redirects we used to redirect all URLs from the previous blog to the current blog. Also known as 301 permanent redirects, 301 redirects are a the most important SEO item to consider when changing URL structures or moving from one domain to another. In the case of TheRangeBlog.com, we actually moved from rangeonlinemedia.com/blog to therangeblog.com. We implemented 301 redirects for all URLs, and it’s been a week since the move. But the question is: Have these 301 redirects kicked in yet?
When will Google remove those old URLs from their index?
Hey Yahoo! Have you even heard of a 301 redirect?
Partial Credit for Bing. They never really indexed our old blog very well anyways.
All 3 top search engines still have a lot of URLs indexed from the previous blog location:
- Google: 127 URLs indexed
- Yahoo: 244 URLs indexed
- MSN Bing: 29 URLs indexed
This is not surprising in the least bit. While all search engines advocate the use of 301 redirects when changing URL structures and/or domains, they don’t seem to remove the old site URLs very quickly. In my experience, it can take a up to 3 months. It really just depends on the number of URLs and other factors. I mean, maybe googlebot is having a rough day or something.
The old Range blog at rangeonlinemedia.com/blog had about 300 URLs. Included in those 300 URLs were post pages, archive pages, tags, author pages and other links on the blog. As mentioned earlier, we created 301 redirects for all URLs. Here is how we redirected those URLs:
- Posts (301 redirected on a 1-to-1 basis to the post URLs on the new blog)
- Archives (301 redirected all archive pages to the http://therangeblog.com/)
- Tags (301 redirected all tag pages to the http://therangeblog.com/)
- Author pages (301 redirected all author pages to the http://therangeblog.com/)
- Images, CSS files, RSS links, etc… (301 redirected all misc file URLs to the http://therangeblog.com/)
I typically advocate 301 redirecting every URL on a 1-to-1 basis to its counterpart URL on a new site. For TheRangeBlog.com, we did that for post pages. For all other URLs, we created a wildcard redirect. Basically, all non-post URLs are 301′d to the homepage of TheRangeBlog.com. It was a time/resource issue. I know, I know. Not perfect, but it’ll have to do. BTW, none of our old blog URLs had any links, so I wasn’t too worried about 301′ing a random tag URL to its counterpart on the new blog. Just sayin’ is all…
Well, that’s about it for now. Stay tuned for more – in the future!
