Waiting for the Engines After an Internal 301

Rand over at SEOmoz is sharing some interesting data on the lag between implementing an internal 301 and when the search engines finally recognize the new URL.

For us, I’ve noticed that Google takes between 2 and 6 weeks to recognize and properly index, although the rankings seem to follow fairly directly (so links must be re-directing, too). For MSN, it’s a bit shorter - 1-3 weeks depending on the site. Yahoo! can take the longest, with between 4-8 weeks being standard, although there are exceptions on bigger sites.

External 301s is a different story - the engines (except MSN) are terrible about catching up with those.

As always, Yahoo!’s well behind Google and MSN here.