I know this is not an easy question, but lately anyway, in rough terms, how long doe it take:
a) 301 pages (those redirected to “other pages”) to drop off the Google index?
b) meta noindex pages, same question
Its been about 2 1/2 weeks since these pages were introduced. An xml site map was done about 2 weeks ago with it “downloaded” by G at the end of the month.
-Waiting for these type of pages to go before I promote the site, since anyone reviewing the site can notice via the Google custom searchbar results. The noindex pages still have their old tiltles that supposedly could have been changed to something generic like “page has been moved” but the 301’s still have their old titles anyway. There are a lot of both.
Let me try to answer, hope it give some info. How long it take to replace the index, it is depend on PR and click through rate of the page. High PR page have high crawl rate, it speed the update.
Google takes upto 6 months to pass on all the credit to the new domain (I can say this from my personal experience)
I think, there is no harm in starting promotion of your new website. If you old domain appears in search results, user will be redirected to new domain.
I imagine this will depend on your crawl rate – sites that Google likes and which publish content frequently will get crawled more quickly, and so will get updated more quickly.
If it’s only ‘moved’ pages that are the problem then I wouldn’t worry, because anyone clicking on one of those links will be taken to the new page anyway. If you’ve got pages that have actually been removed still showing then it might be better to wait until they’ve gone.
Keep in mind when trying to stimulate crawl frequency, that the crawl rate of your pages is based on the PR of them, meaning your higher PR pages will get crawled more often. So that being said, it is a good idea to link new content from the higher PR pages and to try and increase the overall PR of your pages.
PR is only one of the factor to impact crawl rate, because PR only update every 2-3 months. Although PR stay no update, but visit rate and click through rate are on going. So the most accurate answer will be depend on click through rate, bounce rate and conversion.
There is also not a hard limit on our crawl. The best way to think about it is that the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank. So if you have a lot of incoming links on your root page, we’ll definitely crawl that. Then your root page may link to other pages, and those will get PageRank and we’ll crawl those as well. As you get deeper and deeper in your site, however, PageRank tends to decline.
Another way to think about it is that the low PageRank pages on your site are competing against a much larger pool of pages with the same or higher PageRank. There are a large number of pages on the web that have very little or close to zero PageRank. The pages that get linked to a lot tend to get discovered and crawled quite quickly. The lower PageRank pages are likely to be crawled not quite as often.
Based on what Matt Cutts says, scaling the site down significantly while given the same PR for the site, may actually help the crawls then, is the way I take it.
Have noticed that the pages with noindexes, rather than dropping off, have reverted back to Oct 011 with the cache - apparantly the only ones. Is this the final phase before G. committs the act of seperation?