This morning I reviewed a campaign that I had been working on recently, and was astounded by how quickly Google had taken account of a number of recent changes.

Last Saturday (September 1st), a brand new site was launched on the same domain as an older site used to exist. It was a full redesign, page construction changed dramatically, and file names were changed. The content on the pages remained the same or similar, but many new pages were added to the site at the same time.

When I was looking on Monday morning, I could see already that a good number of the new pages had already been crawled and indexed by Google. I didn't really expect them to be turning up this quickly, but it seems we were fortunate that Google crawled these pages on the day that the new site was being rolled out.

Also the site changed from being hosted in the USA, to being hosted in the UK. Matt has already discussed the importance of location and websites

I thought that we would probably have to take a short term hit in rankings, particularly in the big daddy of the search engines, Google. However, Apollo ran its check on the rankings for the site in question, and I found that the site within 5 days was now appearing in Google UK results. And for the 20 benchmark phrases that we are working on with this campaign, 6 of this went to the first page (top 10).

Also, when reviewing the Google.com rankings, I can see that a number of pages that we had 301 redirected have dropped out of rankings to already be replaced by the pages that we redirected them to. My standard advice, based on previous experience, is that this process would normally take 3-6 weeks, depending on how quickly the site is crawled. So you can imagine how pleased I was to see these not only go through nearly instantly, but many ranking positions were also improving simultaneously!

I suppose the moral of this, is that Google constantly surprises you! Certainly I have been impressed with how fast this site's ranking profile has developed. Let's just hope that we can maintain the momentum on this site.