301 redirect, when does Google do its job?

Ive had a 301 redirect from a site that ranks number 1 for a keyword in place for one week.

The new site isn't benefiting from any rank improvements yet. Any ideas how long this takes.

And will the new site jump to the same position that old one was at?

Should I expect the new site to get to number 1?

Doing a 301 redirect alone is not enough, you need to start over with linkbuilding.

As far as I know 301 only passes trust-rank.

thanks clade, thats interesting. My new site is currently on page 3, so Im keeping a close eye on it.

Im still link building regular to the new site.

Checking site:www.myoldsite.com still shows indexed pages. Am I correct in thinking google will remove these once the 301 redirect kick in?

@bigfred

Was in your shoes in the past and it took quite some time, but after a while I noticed the improvements I was expecting. So, all you need to do is being patient.

@clade

I'm not sure about what you refer to with "trust rank" but I witnessed some radical improvements on my rankings for the kw I built backlinks to the domain that got 301redirected to the new URL.

I.e.

-built backlinks for "keyword1" to URL1
-URL1 redirected to URL2 with a 301 redirect
-URL2 ranks for "keyword1" after some time (more than the usual time you wait for backlinks indexing, I'd say)

This is was experience, hope it helps.

businessbira, thanks for your post. what was the time scale when you noticed ranking changes?

matt cutt said that 301 pass trust-rank and links but is not sure about anchor text. Because of the anchor text issue you will have to start again your link campaign

I think I have more backlinks to the new site then the old one anyway

bigfred said:

businessbira, thanks for your post. what was the time scale when you noticed ranking changes?

Click to expand...

I'm not sure about that, sorry. Probably between 3 to 4 weeks.
I got so annoyed because of the unexpected delay, I remember, and I just stopped caring about it (I tried it on a site that wasn't really important to me).

Then after some time, I rechecked and I was on the first page for the kw the redirecting URL (not the URL itself) had got backlinked.

About 301 redirects passing what and what not:

Frankly, I have no idea. I got to know 301 redirects by reading some courses about IM to promote offline business where it was explained to offer SEO services to offline business, building backlinks to a 301redirect with the anchor text your client wanted to rank for and then let the client pay you a monthly fee to keep the redirect redirecting to their URL. This way if he stops paying, you just search a competitor and you change the 301 redirect to the new client's site.

I tried it by myself and as we speak, I'm ranking #1 for a kw (not so great, I admit it but i'm sure a lot of people here will be happy to rank for) with a URL that's not even optimized for that specific kw and has no backlinks pointing to it with that kw/anchor text. The only reason it's now ranking where it is, it's the 301 redirect to which I built backlinks anchoring that specific kw (I can give the OP the kw/URL of the site i'm talking about, if he likes to give a look to its backlinks profile and see if there are any other explanations for the site to rank for that kw).

What I read on those IM courses proved to be true, I expected it to be so I was ok with that, no wonder.

Matt Cutts can say whatever he wants, I do my tests and can speak only based on my experience. And this is my experience.

I suggest you to do the same.

Personally though, I'm done with 301 redirects. If I can, I avoid them. They seem to take more time to kick in and they act weird.

Thanks guys.

Just setting up the 301 redirects for the inner pages and the front page.

I have this:

redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/
redirect 301 /about/ http://www.newsite.com/about/
redirect 301 /services/ http://www.newsite.com/our-services/
redirect 301 /contact/ http://www.newsite.com/contact-us/

The first redirect works fine. The second redirects fine, however the 3rd and 4th dont
As you can see the 3rd and 4th redirect are for inner pages being redirected to the new site inner pages with different URLs.

When I enter the old url, example www.oldsite.com/services/ in the address bar, I get redirected to www.newsite.com/services/ and not www.newsite.com/our-services/
Any ideas why this is, am I missing something?

Is it possibly that you need to escape your - like \- I am not sure what platform you are on, or how you are doing the redirect, but if you are using something that takes a regex, you will need to escape your -

Add the redirect info in google webmaster tools. they will ask you to verify the new domain as well.

It took 5-7 days when I used it last month. I can now see all the old domain backlinks in the new domain dashboard.

Figured it out, I have changed it to

redirect 301 / [URL="http://www.newsite.com/inde.php"]http://www.newsite.com/inde.php[/URL]
redirect 301 /about/ http://www.newsite.com/about/
redirect 301 /services/ http://www.newsite.com/our-services/
redirect 301 /contact/ http://www.newsite.com/contact-us/

This seems to work.

Does that look right?

Scripteen good tip about webmaster tools. I forgot about that

In the .htacess file, do I need to put anything before the redirect, or can i just put this is and nothing else?

redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/