Webmasters and search engine optimization professionals sometimes setup 301 redirects on their sites to replace old un-crawlable URLs with ones friendly to search engine indexing and ranking.
But a webmaster recently expressed on a WebMasterWorld thread his frustration with his rankings after redirecting the majority of his site to new URLs. He’s getting a bit nervous in thinking the redirect was a big mistake and will have disastrous consequences for his long-term goals.
Prior to the change, he had #1 and #3 rankings in Google and Bing respectively but has since seen rankings fluctuate wildly. He’s pondering whether to forget about the 301 redirect and go back to his original URLs.
This issue here is – a month after instituting a 301 redirect, should you reverse course if rankings are not improving?
According to WebMasterWorld veteran willybfriendly, it generally takes 3-4 months for all of this to work itself out. Changing course will only lengthen the time it takes to get your search engine rankings back.
Rusty Brick at S.E. Roundtable agrees – if after that 3-4 month time frame you’re not seeing an improvement, there may be another issue with your domain.
Join the forum discussion at WebMasterWorld.