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Today's question comes from Jacob in Denmark.
Jacob wants to know, if I get a new domain and want to 301
redirect www.olddomain.com to www.newdomain.com, how long do
I have to keep the redirect up before I can start using the
old domain for something else?
Just until it has been crawled once?
Well, this is something where search engines can change
their policy over time, because we might see the web
evolving, or we might see how webmasters either have issues,
those sorts of things.
I can tell you about my experience moving from
mattcutts.com to dullest.com and then dullest.com back to
mattcutts.com Whenever I decided to move back, I used a
301 redirect.
And it took a period of several weeks, because
remember, 301s happen at a page level.
So just because you see one 301 on one page of the old
domain does not mean the entire domain
has completely migrated.
What I did, is I set up the redirect such that every
single page was redirecting from dullest.com to
mattcutts.com so it had been a complete transition.
And I really didn't bother to check on dullest.com for a few
weeks, maybe a couple months.
And then when I went back and looked at Google Analytics, at
that point, all of my traffic had swapped over from
dullest.com to mattcutts.com
So typically, over a period of a few weeks, or several weeks,
maybe think about it like a couple months, for example,
then we might be able to detect that a site has
entirely moved.
But if we're getting mixed signals, like some pages
return a 200, which is an OK, while other pages return a
permanent or 301 redirect, then we really don't know what
to make of that.
I've certainly seen some situations recently where a
site said, I moved from olddomain.com to
newdomain.com, but they forgot to do a subdomain.
And so they were still serving 200s on the old subdomain.
So it's definitely not the case that you can assume, oh,
everything will automatically, magically work perfectly.
We do have a tool in Google Webmaster Tools where you can
say, my site has moved from here to here.
So you can do that for the 301s on each page level.
But I wouldn't just assume it only has to be crawled once.
Really, Googlebot and Google need to build up enough
confidence to really know that a site has fully migrated from
the old site to the new site.
So it can take a little while, but hopefully, after a while,
we do pick up on that.