SEO: When is it safe to pull 301 Redirects?

Our client - bedonwellcounselling.co.uk - provides formal training for counsellors. I put a website together for them a few years back and it has performed well.

Recently I rebuilt the website under a new domain - bedonwelltraining.co.uk - and I put in a whole load of 301 redirects to maintain the search engine ranking.

In the very near future however, we will be building a new site for a counselling centre and they want to use the original domain - bedonwellcounselling.co.uk for this.

The logic behind this is completely sensible as they are separating out the counselling practice and the training business. However, my question is, if I use the old domain for this new centre and pull all the 301’s what is the risk to the SEO status for the newer ‘training’ domain? In other words, how long do you need to keep the 301’s redirecting before a new domain stands on it’s own two feet as it were?

You can keep the old URLs still redirecting as long as that same URL is not needed on the new site.

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Most of them won’t be but the home page will!

No one really knows the answer. But I would say that as long as both sites are properly submitted to the Google Search console, then you should be good to go.

Can’t you check for links to the old pages?

Google console should be of help.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9049606?hl=en

Not quite sure what you mean here? The 301’s are all fine at present. What I’m concerned about is using the old domain (which is currently an alias for the training site) for a brand new site and whether the training site will have sufficient ranking without those 301’s.

If you have the old domain on Google console you should be able to see if anything is still linking to a any of the old pages.

Of not then any search engine juice should have been converted to the new pages.

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I get you - thanks

If I search for Bedonwell Training (redirected domain) , bedonwellcounselling.co.uk is still the first domain to be returned! Some bedonwelltraining.co.uk pages appear further down. maybe just needs another week or so?

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