Redirecting 301 Redirects -- Will Search Engines Notice?

[SEOTeamSF]

Hello Mozzers,

We're currently evaluating a client site where the previous web developer redesigned the site and got lazy, 301 redirecting hundreds of pages to the home page instead of to their respective new URLs. Ugh.

In any case, we will probably fix this for the sake of implementing best practices. But I am curious how search engines treat 301'd URLs, as they are supposed to be permanent redirects. Will search crawlers ever visit the old URLs again to find that we've re-redirected them? Or have they written them off as moved to the home page for good, meaning that there's no way to direct the authority of the previous URLs to their rightful targets?

Thanks!

[Dan-Petrovic]

The message is: This move is permanent, however, crawlers will always follow links and always bump into old version of the page so there is a chance that they may pick up that 301 is changed or removed. Google (Matt Cutts) also stated that they follow 301 chains but they do not guarantee that it would work well if you have many 301s in the chain. Search engines obey 301 much more firmly than rel canonical for instance as 301 is a directive and canonical is a "hint" as he describes it.

To answer your specific question, if you set new redirection rules they will be picked up. That said I have had cases in the past where it took Google more than 6 months to clean up messy redirection situations and some cases where they have completely failed it at. In your case it should be all fairly straightforward.

[bemcapaz]

Recently I just did a domain change of a company website, did a 301 redirect for each page and after 2 months everything were fine and keeping the same position in SERP it previously had (some even gained rank)

The only thing is, the site was quite small, with around 15 links, so was a easy job to do.