When is it time to kill 301 redirects

[AdvanceSystems]

3 months we updated our site design design and as such lots of page urls changed. At the time we 301 redirected about 100 pages. (All pages are on the same domain - 301 redirects like .com/about-us/company to .com/company)

Anyhow my question is should I leave these redirects active indefinitely or kill them assuming value has passed through by now?

Your Thoughts are welcomed.

Thanks,

Glen.

[AdvanceSystems]

Hi EGOL,

Thanks a mill for the reply really appreciate it. Based on your suggestion I will keep the redirects in place simply just in case in case there is links on other website leading to our pages and I don't want them going to a 404.

Cheers,

Glen

[EGOL]

If I have a link from a page on my site to a page on your site and you kill the redirect then my visitor will hit a 404 on your page.  That is how site-to-site traffic is handled.

Now, search engines could remember that a page is redirected - but I would not bet any money on that.  So, I leave my redirects up forever.

I have a site that produces a lot of temporary content.  We redirect thousands of URLs each year.  To make that easy to manage we use subfolders such as mysite.com/sports/2012/egol-hits-grand-slam/.  When we are ready to abandon the content for /2012/  we will find some that is pulling traffic, redirect it to related page, then all files that have no links or no traffic can be redirected to a single location.  The order of commands in .htaccess allow that to be done easily.