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I made an error when bulk 301 redirecting from an old domain to new domain with same url structure. Google bot followed the 301 redirect for each page on the old site to my new site, which gave a 404 error. I tested it browser in worked for a user but somehow did not work for the google bot and I detected it too late.

I fixed the error now and the pages could be (hopefully) accessed by google bot at their new urls.

Question: will google recrawl 301 redirects which led to 404?

Easy Life
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They'll crawl it for a little while but eventually the 404 status will tell them the page is gone and they will stop crawling it and remove it from their index. If you fixed the error before they stopped crawling the original URL then they will follow the redirect and associate the new URL with the old URL.

John Conde
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  • is there any timeframe suggestion? I fixed the error in 10 to 12 days from they first started to appear (a bulk of about 100 pages a day). I think I can be safe. – Easy Life Aug 22 '14 at 00:36
  • Based on what I've seen at [Webmasters](http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/) I think you should be ok. If you really want to be sure you can create a sitemap with the old URLs so Google can find them and associate them with the new URLs and then in a couple of weeks update the new sitemap to the new URLs. – John Conde Aug 22 '14 at 00:38
  • I thought of a sitemap, but it will contain the same url's that are already 301-redirected to a (then) 404. so that get's as back to the question if google gives up after first 404 on a 301 or makes more attempts later. – Easy Life Aug 22 '14 at 04:48