Hi All, Did some searches and couldn't find a good place to put this. I just wanted to share some news in case anyone out there is just implementing some 301s and wondering how long it will take to kick in. My site is a dynamic e-comm site with several thousand pages. We redesigned the site but kept in on the same URL, although all the pages changed URLs as we had been using ASP and wished to changed. We put 301 redirects for all pages and also implemented a mod-rewrite equivalent to make the URLs a little more search-friendly by removing the parameters. The site is a PR 5 on the homepage and previously had roughly 2,000 pages indexed on average in each of the big 3. - March 19 - launched new site w/ redirects - March 23 (about) - MSN and Yahoo show some of the new pages - MSN shows 11 new pages and Yahoo shows about 30. Old pages are still in the indexes. Google shows that it has re-indexed the homepage only. - March 26 (about) - MSN still showing 11 new pages and all the old ones, Yahoo now showing 95 new pages and all the old ones. Google still only 1 (homepage) and all the old ones. - March 31 - Google still only showing the new homepage and all the old ones. I'm getting worried. Yahoo shows 110 new pages and all the old ones. MSN shows still 11 new pages and all the old ones. - April 1 - Google now "reporting" about 4,000 pages and will actually let me see 1,000 of them (they stop after that apparently). Hooray! Old pages appear to still be there too. MSN still showing 11 new and all the old, this hasn't changed for a while. I've not seen their bot in my logs for a while. In checking the logs I did see Google make a real deep crawl just yesterday - about 10,000 hits on about 100 visits from it. Yahoo has been crawling much more frequently but not as deep. Yahoo now suddenly drops down to only showing 70 new pages. So today, just shy of 2 weeks to the day I've gone from 1 (homepage) to 4,000 + pages all now indexed in Google. Hooray! Let's hope this isn't an April Fool's joke on me!!!
Congrats, nice report too, though do you think the fact you got indexed in google may have been down to the deep crawl they tend to do prior to an update, i.e. it may have been down to good timing on your part?
Perhaps. Are you expecting an update within the new week or so? If so please let me know your sources!
Update: April 7 - roughly 3 weeks in now. MSN just yesterday finally went from 11 indexed pages to 120. Yahoo has been adding a few new pages each day, steadily and now stands at 214. Google is up to 8,930 - a few large increases and a couple of smaller ones as well.
I will probably be doing some redirecting in the near future, but with a much smaller site. Did you notice any changes in ranking?
Did you have any rankings before the redirect? Did you have any change in your rankings? What happened to your PR? Did you have any inner pages with PR? What happened to them?
Lots of changes in rankings, yes - but we re-designed the site - so its hard to tell what caused what. Even had the file paths to each page remained the same I would have expected major changes in rankings due to new layout, revised content. Homepage PR stayed the same. Haven't seen anything on any interior pages yet.
Another update on this... Its now May 2nd - just over 6 weeks from the new launch and we've now got somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 pages in Google, around 5,000 pages in MSN and a little shy still of 500 in Yahoo. Yahoo seems to be adding very slowly but steadily, maybe 5 to 10 new pages per day or so. MSN and Google seem much less steady but index more at a time, hence the discrepancy.
Another Update: Right around 4 months. Google: now up to 40,000 + MSN: been dropping lately, was up to 7-10K then down to 5K now only 1-2K Yahoo: see below for full (approximate) report on pages indexed in Yahoo since we released the resdesign. Several large jumps over short time periods and then several long periods of modest increases and ocassional decreases. Day 1 0 Day 5 30 Day 30 300 Day 50 850 Day 60 950 Day 65 2,000 Day 70 9,000 Day 80 19,000 Day 100 18,000 Day 115 36,000 Day 125 43,000