: Is there a time period for adding 301 redirects to preserve search engine rank? Some URLs have changed on a site several weeks back and no 301 redirects were added to let search engines know

@Fox8124981

Some URLs have changed on a site several weeks back and no 301 redirects were added to let search engines know that the content has moved locations.


Link unavailability will result in Google encountering 404 pages and if these issues aren't fixed (or redirect isn't done), then eventually those links will start disappearing from search results. Important thing to note here is the word "eventually", its because it really depends how frequently Google bots visit (crawl) your website. The more active they are, the more quickly they discover such errors and so on.


Is there a time period that the 301 redirects need to be added in to preserve the site's ranking on search engine?


I believe, there is an indirect answer in the above mentioned reply. I am not aware of any hard limits and instead know that crawl rate determines or rather indicates an approximate time period. Either way, if you are aware of this metric or not, you can always add a redirect to a) preserve traffic, and/or b) fix 404 errors in Google webmaster to let Google know that there is indeed a redirection and link has just moved (and not removed).

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