Just wanted to start on a thread on the subject of internal 301 re-directs. What's been your general experience when re-directing a page or set of pages to the "canonical" or new version? How long have the engines taken to catch up?

For us, I've noticed that Google takes between 2 and 6 weeks to recognize and properly index, although the rankings seem to follow fairly directly (so links must be re-directing, too). For MSN, it's a bit shorter - 1-3 weeks depending on the site. Yahoo! can take the longest, with between 4-8 weeks being standard, although there are exceptions on bigger sites.

External 301s is a different story - the engines (except MSN) are terrible about catching up with those.