How to speed up transition towards new 301 redirected landing pages?

[robdraaijer]

Hi SEO's,

I have a question about moving local landing pages from many separate pages towards integrating them into a search results page.

Currently we have many separate local pages (e.g. www.3dhubs.com/new-york). For both scalability and conversion reasons, we'll integrate our local pages into our search page (e.g. www.3dhubs.com/3d-print/Bangalore--India).

**Implementation details: **To mitigate the risk of a sudden organic traffic drop, we're currently running a test on just 18 local pages (Bangalore) = 1 / 18). We applied a 301 redirect from the old URL's to the new URL's 3 weeks ago. Note: We didn't yet update the sitemap for this test (technical reasons) and will only do this once we 301 redirect all local pages. For the 18 test pages I manually told the crawlers to index them in webmaster tools. That should do I suppose.

**Results so far: **The old url's of the 18 test cities are still generating > 99% of the traffic while the new pages are already indexed (see: https://www.google.nl/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:www.3dhubs.com/3d-print/&start=0). Overall organic traffic on test cities hasn't changed.

Questions:

1. Will updating the sitemap for this test have a big impact? Google has already picked up the new URL's so that's not the issue. Furthermore, the 301 redirect on the old pages should tell Google to show the new page instead, right?

2. Is it normal that search impressions will slowly shift from the old page towards the new page? How long should I expect it to take before the new pages are consistently shown over the old pages in the SERPS?

[robdraaijer]

Thanks Andy, at least this gives me reassurance that nothing strange is going on here. I'll wait for a bit longer and see what happens.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Rob,

1. Will updating the sitemap for this test have a big impact? Google has already picked up the new URL's so that's not the issue. Furthermore, the 301 redirect on the old pages should tell Google to show the new page instead, right?

No, updating the sitemap won't speed the indexing up (but you should do this as a matter of course), but a 301 redirect should tell Google that there is a new page in place.

2. Is it normal that search impressions will slowly shift from the old page towards the new page? How long should I expect it to take before the new pages are consistently shown over the old pages in the SERPS?

I have asked John Mueller this in the past and he said "as long as it takes - just have patience".

Basically, sit tight because sometimes it can take hours, other times it can take weeks and months.

I would need to be taking a more in depth look to see if there was anything else going on.

-Andy