How long does google take to correctly handle 301's? I 301'd an entire site to another domain over a month ago and google still hasn't picked it up yet.... They used to be pretty quick at detecting them but it seems to take for ever more recently.
I guess whenever google bot visits your old website, this info will be updated. How frequently did google bot visit your website before you made the redirect.
yahoo has picked it up fine. msn is just completely screwed (for a change) and treats the 301 as a link from the old website to the new one google has the new site indexed but still maintains a copy of both sites in the index
By using Google Sitemaps and 301 redirects, I was able to eliminate tens of thousands of pages that Google had improperly indexed for my site within a couple of weeks. 301 redirects are great for eliminating URL concatination issues (e.g. bogus querystrings).
A 301 is a way of redireting people and SE's to a different page. Say you had a page at www.example.com/info/rules.html but moved that page to www.example.com/rules.html In this case a 301 would allow you to redirect anyone that uses the old link to the new page. How to do it; http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php hope this helps!
i also used 301s to eliminate a lot of duplicate content, around 4000 urls, and it worked great around the time of the big daddy change over. Which is why i'm surprised its taking so long this time.