When you move your home or business, you file a change of address card, inform your friends and customers, etc., so they can find you.
It’s the same on the Internet.
When redesigning a website or even just moving to a new address (domain name, URL), steps need to be taken so you can still be found.
Especially, so that Google can find you.
There is a recommended way to do this called a 301 redirect. Google specifically says that this will preserve existing search engine rankings.
It applies on a page by page basis, which is why it matters in a redesign. If you are changing any page names, Google, directories and anyone who has bookmarked pages of your site need to know so someone trying to go to page A arrives at the new Page B.
But how long does the process take?
When you first move a website or change a page name, no one knows about it, including Google. Your 301 redirects send someone to the new page or domain names.
But how long before the dust settles and Google knows all the new page names and sends people directly to them?
We have done several tests on this, moving websites of several hundred pages from one URL to another, and at the same time changing at least some page names.
With this large a change, each time, it took about 2 months for the process to complete.
Now Google has confirmed our results in this new video from Matt Cutts:
When I change domains, how long should I leave the redirects in place?
One point Matt makes which we found essential: Monitor the switchover.
You periodically check rankings, to see if your old or new page names or domain name are ranking. You regularly search for “site:{domain name}” to see all the pages Google is indexing, to see which domain or page names are showing up.
Over time you’ll see both of these gradually switch from old to new. If any pages don’t seem to be switching over, you can investigate (as Matt did, you may find you missed redirecting some pages).
You could leave your 301 redirect code up forever, because possibly there are links still out there to your old domain or page names. Definitely you should try and get any links changed that are valuable (either because of page rank or because they are sending traffic to your site).
Otherwise, once the process is complete, you can delete the 301 redirects.
