How long until 301 passes juice to new site?

[RobertFisher]

We put up a new site for an attorney and changed his url along with total redevelopment. We used a 301 for the old to the new and it does resolve to the new. It has been one month and the old site in OSE still shows DA of 37 with PA for homepage of 15.

The new site has come up.....to a DA of 6 with homepage at 1 still. For any who might wish it, the referring site is theHollandLawFirm.com and the new site is Houston-Bankruptcy-Attorney.info.

Would love to know of any experience with the timing on this.

[joseph.chambers]

Let me tell you this from what I seen. I just moved a website from /store/ to root about 3 weeks ago and google still has all of the OLD /store/ links in the search engines however all of the serp results have / in them. So it's like it didn't update its index for 3 weeks. I have never done anything like this before so I am wondering the same thing.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Robert,

Search engines seem unwilling to define a specific time period and of course that is reasonable as there are a number of factors that can affect the process.

Am I correct in assuming from your words "used a 301 for the old to the new" that you have used a blanket 301? (to the homepage for example)

If this is the case, I believe it is likely to take longer for search engines to recognize the change as a "move".

If you redirect specific pages on the old domain to relevant or matching pages on the new domain, search engines are more able to recognize that the pages have moved and over time transfer link juice and update indexes. Using a blanket 301 leaves a question mark for the search engine as to whether the old domain may simply be used for its SEO value to feed traffic to a page which may not be relevant to the end user.

Matt Cutts explains his reasoning for using specific page-to-page 301's to move a domain in this video (with a reminder that 301's happen at page level, not domain level).

I'm quite passionate about page-to-page 301's, which drives my Tech people a little nuts, BUT I just bite the bullet and do them myself nowadays. Although it can be a huge amount of work to do this correctly, my goal is to do it in the best way possible and to have some small measure of control over external factors wherever possible.

In the end, I am the person who will have to answer the client's questions about what is happening with the site because right or wrong, "SEO" seems to translate to "responsible for everything" :).  I like to be able to tell my clients that we took the trouble to go the long way around something because it was better for them (and less likely to damage conversions on the new site).

Also - signalling the domain move in Webmaster Tools should help the process along, but I have seen several Googlers, including Matt Cutts qualify this as a "hint', so we shouldn't assume that it solves the problem. (BTW "Webmaster Tools" refers to both Google and Bing)

While this is not a definitive answer, hope it helps

Sha

[RobertFisher]

Ahhhh, Sha Menz....I am now kicking myself. That is an excellent answer from an intuitive standpoint (and Matt Cutts too). Thanks for the assist, I will go back in and redirect page to page where it is relevant. Any issues I need to be aware of?

Thanks again,

[ShaMenz]

Ouch! Don't do that ... it hurts! (the kicking I mean)

Just 3 things that ever present significant issues that I am aware of

1. Most obvious is the time required to do it properly, which will depend how large the site is. If the page structure has changed significantly then you may need to point some redirects to a category page or something else relevant. I set up a simple excel file for the site with Old URL, Content, Category, Redirect URL, Redirect date and Check date. Once I've added the old URL and content info I then assign it to a category and Redirect URL, then use the list to set up the redirects. I generally spin through and do a manual check once the 301's are in place and use the check date column if there are a lot of pages and I need to come back and finish checking later.

2. I would also add a 404 catch-all just in case - all 404's go to home page or another appropriate page to make sure no old links are lost.

3. When choosing your redirect URL, think about the user and relevance - For example, if I click a link to buy an item which no longer exists, there is probably more chance I will look at another product if you send me to a store page full of products than send me to home.

Have fun!

Sha