301 redirects delay in picking up

[musthavemarketing]

Hi I have been involved in the redesign/development of a website which has up until now had a lot of international traffic.  On day of migration I uploaded all the 301 redirects to the website (wordpress) using Simple 301 redirect plugin.  I tested a number of them and they appeared to be working. I also submitted the new sitemaps to Search Console. Since migration international traffic - particularly from countries such as india, Phillipines, Sri Lanka etc have significantly dropped off whereas the local traffic and some of the international traffic such as USA has remained fairly consistent.  Looking at Analytics and entrances recently it appears as though search results are/were showing a number of pages with 404's (one in particular which received significant traffic and for which I had created a 301 redirection) - I have checked this page using the old url and it re-directs correctly for me and today asked a colleague in India to also check - he is getting the redirection fine.  Does Google.in take a significantly longer time to pick these up in search results? Or am I missing something?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

HI Allie,

How long has now passed since the changes were made on the site? Has anything updated since posting this?

-Andy

[MattRoney]

Hi Allie! We'd love an update on this.

[musthavemarketing]

Hi Guys, No nothing - we wondered whether the re-direction plugin had conflicted with another and so was not working correctly.  I am literally stumped.  We have tried uploading all the re-directions via the htaccess file - the old school way to ensure no 404s exist in the future so watch with baited breath.

[Aleyda]

Hi Allie,

Can you please specify for which type of sites you were moving to and to which Web structure you moved? For example, if you moved from ccTLDs to sub-directories on a new domain.

In this case about international migrations is not only that you validate the typical migration best practices of 301-redirects from old to new Web structure, updates of new links and XML sitemap, but also that you make sure that the new web structure where you are migrating is correctly geolocating to the appropriate country markets, geolocating the subdirectories or subdomains in GSC if you're not using a ccTLD, using hreflang annotations, making sure the content is relevant and optimized for the targeted country or language, using the appropriate popular terms and keywords in those markets, etc.

So as you can see, besides the typical best practices of a migration it should be about you verifying if you kept the international targeting and configuration that you might even have had in the past and now you don't ... and how you're keeping the relevance that you used to have too.

Thanks,

Aleyda

[musthavemarketing]

Hi Aleyda,

Thanks for the response. The website is a .com and actually attracts visitors internationally,  although none of the content is aimed at specific countries. The content is more or less the same as it was on the original version though.  We use categories on the website, though due to the fact w can add no content to category pages we have created content page to look and feel like a category page , set the categories to no index and ensured the content pages that replace them are the rel-canonical.  Visitor numbers are starting to improve steadily now.