The dynamics of Search Engines change

Does anyone know how it usually takes for the change to on the website to take effect in search engines?

The reason I'm asking is because a week ago I made a ground breaking change on the website (moved from one CMS to another, much more SEO friendly) and so far I haven't seen any change in the search engine generated entries. The old URL's are being redirected to matching content on the new CMS, might that be a reason to not have them re-indexed straight away?

Does the change dynamic depend on the search engine? Does it take longer for website with plenty of pages to get re-indexed? I'm guessing that the answer to the question is yes, but I hope someone will have more specific info.

Thanks!

This depends on how often the search engine spiders/robots come to your site. Some sites only get visited every month.

The homepage should get updated first and could very possibly take 1-2 weeks to reflect on the search engines.

The inner page my take even longer still... since most search engine only do a deep crawl through your whole website every month or so.

Be patient.

Thanks for the reply BGreen.

I just found out what was going on, but only after google stopped listing my pages

For some reason the new CMS was bugged and the short urls, that worked in the browser returned a 404 error when I tested them with the SEO friendly redirect tool (www.seochat.com/seo-tools/redirect-check/).

I managed to put a workaround in place, but I'm afraid that the damage has been done already.

Does someone know if google will re-check the pages it removed from index to see if they came back online? Or will I have to fight for ranking all over again?

it also depends on the changes that you made on your site...
your changes, promotion, seo to your site.. reflects your SE rankings...

That's exactly my problem. I did make sure the old pages are redirected properly to the new pages, but as it turned out, but some strange bug, the crawlers thought that the new pages were broken (returned 404 error) and thus were removed from the search results.

I fixed the error, so old pages redirect to new, working ones, but I'm afraid that it's too late...

Just as a clarification check: make sure you're using 301 redirects (Permanent), not 302 redirects (Temporary).

I do understand what you're saying, but the point is - google stopped sending people to my old URL's already... isn't it too late for redirects?

Not necessarily. If you have 302 redirects in place, then you've told the spiders that the content is only being replaced temporarily so they'll keep trying to come back to see if the original page has been restored. If you have 301s in place, then that's a whole different story.

Ive never seen so much garbage in one post... AragornSG: Google is very smart and once you have completely taken care of any bugs, 301 the old redirects (regardless of them not ranking anymore) and started updating your website again they will come back and see a much cleaner website, and so should IMO push you further then you were before.

If in this time you also suddenly had an increase in the amount of natural links coming in from cleaning up your website and having a much better experience for your users then google will be alot more happy then they would have been before.

Roa had the most valid points of this thread (once the problem was known) but please ignore posts like this:

"You should try removing old pages from your Google webmaster account. It will help you to replace old pages quickly.

As far as Yahoo is concerned, it is a slow snail, but still it will pick up new pages soon."

This is rubbish. DO NOT remove your old pages from google, but find these old pages a new home on your website by using a 301 redirect (not a 302, this will hurt your website more). Otherwise you will be losing content instead of creating it! Every heared the saying: "Content is king!"?

Hey Monkey Man!

Thanks a lot for the advice. Seems that there is hope for me after all. The previous website had tons of useless pages and even more duplicated content, all with unfriendly urls and page code full of trash... GoogleBots should like the new one much more.

The only thing I'd be missing from the website is the particular pages that were highly ranked in Google and generated huge chunk of my traffic... but if you're saying that crawlers will come back and find the 301 redirects pointing to the new URL's - that would be dream come true.

For now however I'm sitting in a gutter, waiting for crawlers to come back... *sigh*

btw, the old, long url's are blocked in the robots.txt - is that going to impact crawlers trying to see if the links are back/are pointing to new locations?