I have a quick SEO question that I wanted to throw out there and garner opinions: How much is lost if you change a 301 redirect from one page to another after two weeks? month? Is anything lost? Will Google, SEs recognize the new page? Essentially, one of my clients pushed a 301 redirect from an old page to our main category page (one level below the homepage) when we really wanted to 301 redirect to a new version of the page. If we discovered this three weeks later when Google has already recognized the redirect (thus pulling the old URL out of their index) - what has been lost if we correct that change after the fact? Thanks in advance for your help! P.S. the old page has many links pointing to it.
You can go ahead with the Redirect to the new page. It wouldn't affect in any way. All related backlinks with anchor texts will be moved on to the new page. Consider this just as Updating your Page title in the <head> section, upon noticing the search bot just updates the new info in the index.
So you don't believe there is any juice lost despite Google and others saying that 301s do not always pass all the juice, I can imagine moving a 301 to one page, and then moving it to another, it would lose ~30% each time, for a net loss of around 51% of link juice.