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301 Redirects almost 1 year after bad relaunch – any real recovery experiences?
Posted by on January 8, 2026 at 10:45 pmHi everyone,
I’m looking for real-world experiences with late 301 redirects after a failed website relaunch.
Background:
The site was 10+ years old and had very strong organic traffic.
About 11–12 months ago, it was relaunched very poorly:- old URLs were simply dropped
- no 301 redirects
- new URL structure
- a few strong backlinks still point to 404s
Result: organic traffic collapsed almost completely and never recovered.
Now we’re considering doing a proper 1:1 301 mapping from the old URLs to the most relevant new ones.
My questions:
- Has anyone here successfully recovered traffic by adding 301s almost a year later?
- Did Google still pass noticeable signals after that time, or was the effect minimal?
I know it won’t fully recover, but I’m trying to understand whether a meaningful partial recovery is still realistic or if the window is basically closed after ~12 months.
Thanks
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1 Reply
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We have seen modest recovery by implementing very belated redirects. The oldest example I had was about 2 years past due, and we still saw some lift within 60 days of the redirect to URLs. Not a formal case study.
We have seen better outcomes by reaching out to inbound link hosts and asking them to update the URL directly. We usually present it as a friendly ‘you have a bad link on our site and we’ve changed the URL’….
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* Has anyone here successfully recovered traffic by adding 301s almost a year later?
define successfully. if you mean ALL of your traffic, I doubt it’s even possible nowadays with AI taking a big bite. But yes, you can recover a lot of traffic, that’s the whole idea of 301
* Did Google still pass noticeable signals after that time, or was the effect minimal?
It depends. Your previous pages were more than just content to Google: they were an equation involving technical aspects and, most importantly, authority. If the links and mentions those pages earned still exist, then yes, you’ll recover a significant portion of your authority. Again, as in the previous answer, not all of it, but a good part. However, if most of those links have ‘gone down the drain,’ the effect will be negligible. That said, your original pages also inherited authority simply by being part of your domain (internal links, etc.), so restoring them will always be better than nothing
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Damn! ive had migrations where the redirects took 3 days and i was stressing out over how long that was ! But Do it, yeah redirect.
i’ve seen this, it can maybe maybe help a tiny bit depending on how many backlinks there are. Most of the keyword rankings or traffic, i’m assuming that’s all long dead and gone by now.
& I would expect little to no recovery at this point, just to not over promise and underdeliver any of your expectations of this. But as a marketer trying to rectify the situation, i think it’s only right to redirect this and bury it.
Maybe hold a postmortem with the devs, about what went wrong and how we need to redirect things we turn off, yada yada yada, if applicable
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Do you know how many backlinks are you recovering? Do you have a bunch of 404’s in Google search console?
I’ve never been a position quite like this. But fwiw I’ve managed to snag traffic from 4 or 5 year old backlinks to defunct URLs from buying websites (years of 404ing), and they still generate traffic and authority.
It’s still a worthwhile effort, but probably some of the impactful backlinks to the old URLs have been changed out- because some ppl are really on top of things and don’t like dead links.
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When you do a migration, how much time is allowed to pass before implementing 301s?
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My experience. 301s lost tons of traffic. I recovered after I forced the tech guy to recreate the exact url for our old money pages there were about 50 I really cared about
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301 com reindexação de backlinks e novos backlinks e conteúdos com schema UpdateDate. Funciona *ainda*.
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