I have set up a 301 redirect from the root folder to a subfolder on my domain, before i did this i saw the googlebot come by twice a day, it was like this for months, then i swithced and i didn't come anymore at all. I always thought the googlebot could follow a 301, am i wrong? Best regards, Eiso
Google can follow a 301 but it takes time. Once they have you indexed a certain way they don't want to let that go. I'm strugling with an entire domain redirect and Google is not taking it well at all. I'm in the third month with it.
Over here at seobook WMW Nov 2005 conference notes Google is saying 2 weeks to 6 months for a 301 to take effect ...
I've got one site that looks like it's going for the 6-month mark, so it can definitely take G a while. Another site of mine had the 301 recognized in about a week...
I have had it happen both ways, 1 domain took 2 weeks and another took 5 months. The last 301 I did, before hand I took the the new URL that the 301 would redirect to, I set it up and put a bit on content on it, I then put a couple of links to it from other sites of mine. After Google picked it up. I did the 301 and within a couple of days Google was indexing and providing results under the new domain.
you won't notice the PR transfer (if it transfers this update) until the next PR update... which is supposedly on its way... sometimes this month or early next ....
My experience has been that it's usually been a fairly quick changeover (certainly a matter of 2 or 3 weeks, not months) and the PR transferred at the next Toolbar update (which means it actually transferred before that). The last time was renaming some pages (i.e., new filenames) on an existing site. That was about two weeks before the last Toolbar update and the PR showed up for the new pages with that update.