How long keep 301 redirects?
-
Our site has been updated twice in the past 6 years with new, better urls.
Initially we did 301 redirects 3 years ago for the url redirects.
Recently some of those redirected pages have been redirected again.
Question: How long before it's time to have the old, original urls removed through Google?
And, once that is done, how long to wait before removing the older redirects from the htaccess file?
Appreciate any feedback/insights on this matter.
-
Amazing, thanks for the information and the attached article. It's more than useful.
Thanks for sharing
-
Most of the traffic is from organic and craigslist. Some of the original pages were redirected over 3 years ago, so removing them now won't be a problem.
Thanks
-
Well if the internet was a static entity than leaving the original urls in place is an option. The original urls were optimized using the guidelines of the day ... today, however, they would be considered spam ... hence the change. At least the 404 page gets them back to the site.
Appreciate your input.
-
Hi there
You can also go through old backlinks that point to the old URLs and update those accordingly so that your new URLs are getting the full effect.
Hope this helps - good luck!
-
It really depends on the source of your traffic. If the source of your traffic are old links or direct traffic (i.e. they typed the URL), I'd leave them forever (provided you can't get them updated). It's bad form to drop a redirect from an old page when new users can find old links that appear useful. A good example for me was weather.com, which recently updated their site URL structure and refused to 301 from the old to the new (old page would 404). So for me, who had bookmarked my local weather page, I now had to go back to their home page and search all over again and THEN I was back at my local weather. It was annoying when 301s are cheap and easy.
If all your traffic comes from search engines then I would say you can drop them after a year or so. That's more than enough time for the index to update and the old URLs to fade out.
-
If you remove a redirect for a URL and a link to that URL on another website still points to that old URL, then any visitors who click that link will hit a 404 page. My old redirects will still be there when I attend my funeral. The lesson to learn is don't change your URLs unless absolutely necessary.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Combining products - edit existing product page or 301 redirect to new page?
We want to combine existing products - e.g. 'hand lotion' and 'body lotion' will become 'hand & body lotion'. As such, we'll need to combine the two product pages into one. What would be the best route to take in terms of SEO to do this? My initial reaction is to create a new product page and then 301 or 302 redirect the old products to the new product page depending on if the change is permanent or temporary. Would you agree? Or am I missing something?
On-Page Optimization | | SwankyApple1 -
Is it better to shorten my existing url to use only keyword after domain with a 301 redirect from existing url
I have a long existing URL that has included my key word but the url has about 5 additional words in the text ( eg url would have " /super widgets in stock at the widget store " as url text after domain. keywords is super widget The URL was at the top of search results for my keyword for many years until recently. Is it better to shorten my url text to now use only my keyword " /super-widgets " after the domain with a 301 direct from my existing url to optimize it Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | mrkingsley2 -
Is it OK to 301 redirect 1000s of duplicate random URLs to homepag?
Hello, We found a critical error in our site internal link structure and the way Google indexes it. Website has 1000s of URLs that are basically 50% match to homepage. They all start the same example.com/category/random/random I can do a redirect match and 301 them to homepage. This way 1000s of bogus url are not indexed and no value given. Is it OK to redirect so many URLs to homepage? Platform is creating these URLs because of search query, where it adds all site content to one page. Currently this search page /category / has own canonical and all those duplicate content URLs have canonical to that /category /. To fix my plan is to a. Remove canonical from /category / that way all those duplicate URLs don't have it either. B. Redirect match all URLs that have /category / in them to homepage. (this is most important page where 50% of that content is and should be the main page). Is this plan ok?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud1 -
Www no longer redirects
Hi there, A while back I dropped the www from my domain. Everything redirected ok and I could still access my site using www and it would simply redirect to http://mysite This no longer seems to be occurring. I don't think I have changed anything? I don't believe I had anything in my htaccess however I am looking for some assistance in doing so. I've done a bit of reading but am not 100% confident! If anyone is interested, the url is http://cdkeyprices.com Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | MrPenguin0 -
Redirecting to new domain
Hi, I switched my ecommerce site to a new domain, how can I get my new site indexed aneast art building links when my oils site is still indexed?
On-Page Optimization | | GTCarter11870 -
301 Redirect from .html
Hi there, Following on from this post:
On-Page Optimization | | finelinewebsolutions
http://moz.com/community/q/help-with-duplicated-content Please could one confirm that using the following code in our htaccess file will stop the duplicated content issue we are having. RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^.]+.)+html?\ HTTP
RewriteRule (.+).html?$ http://www.bereavementstationery.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html Kind Regards Alec0 -
Dealing with thin content/95% duplicate content - canonical vs 301 vs noindex
My client's got 14 physical locations around the country but has a webpage for each "service area" they operate in. They have a Croydon location. But a separate page for London, Croydon, Essex, Luton, Stevenage and many other places (areas near Croydon) that the Croydon location serves. Each of these pages is a near duplicate of the Croydon page with the word Croydon swapped for the area. I'm told this was a SEO tactic circa 2001. Obviously this is an issue. So the question - should I 301 redirect each of the links to the Croydon page? Or (what I believe to be the best answer) set a rel=canonical tag on the duplicate pages). Creating "real and meaningful content" on each page isn't quite an option, sorry!
On-Page Optimization | | JamesFx0 -
Anyone know how long it takes Google to Index new site?
Could anyone let me know how long it takes for a NEW site to be indexed in Google please? Am having some robots.txt issues and am keen to see if it got indexed. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Wallander0