What would happen if 301 redirects were not in place

[Nightwing]

Good Morning from 14 degrees C sunny Wetherby UK 

My question is please....

"When a new site is given a total makover ie old urls are re written to radically different ones I know if you dont set up 301 redirects the infamous 404 error page will rear its head. But i wonder if 301 redirects were not configured how long on average does it take google to index the new site and serp links finally point to the new site".

Thanks in advance

[Maximise]

Hi,

It would depend on the authority of the existing site, the more authoritative and important the site is perceived to be the quicker Google would crawl your new pages and update it's index. It could take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. You could check your Webmaster Tools to get an idea of the average crawl rate for your site.

The problem is that you lose all previous authority to your existing URL's as any inbound links that arrive at a 404 do not pass link value into your site. You would also have a negative customer experience for anyone following an external link and arriving on a 404 page.

[IM_Learner]

Recently I deployed a new version of the site and it is not at all an authoritative domain. I deliberately didn't redirect the old urls to the new one and the site with completely new url structure was indexed by Google within 4 days. Then I used the GWT url removal tool to remove the old urls from Google's index which was done within 24 hrs.

I did it as an experiment and the results were fine for me.

[Nightwing]

Brill answers thank you