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
-
Site has 302 redirects for HTTP to HTTPS when it should be 301
Hey all, In the latest Moz crawl, certain pages on our website have shown as having 302 redirects for the http to https, but not all. There should be a 301 solution, but wanted to see if anyone had any advice or guidance. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Julzseo1 -
No difference anymore between 301 and 302
According to http://searchengineland.com/google-no-pagerank-dilution-using-301-302-30x-redirects-anymore-254608 What do you think?
On-Page Optimization | | nans0 -
Update old article or publish new content and redirect old post?
Hi all, I'm targetting a keyword and we used to rank quite good for it. Last couple of months traffic of that keyword (and variations) is going down a bit. I wrote an extensive new post on the same topic, much more in dept and from 600 to 1800 words covering the same topic. Is it better to update the old article and mention that it's updated recently, or publish a new post and redirect the old post to the new post?
On-Page Optimization | | jorisbrabants0 -
Titles - Should they be short or long and descriptiive with keywords?
I just asked a question about ALT tags and then this got me to wondering....I have 300 products, so coming up with titles is not the easiest at times. Some have my keywords and some do not. Should they all have my keywords, despite making the title and the URL longer? It seems like you would want the keyword in the title, but then again the category itself it long. Here is an example: www.site.com/sea-glass-jewelry/by-the-sea (not too long) www.site.com/sea-glass-jewelry/blue-sea-glass-necklace (longer...I have some even longer than this) Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
To redirect or not to redirect...That is the question
We have old product data that is being updated (approx 30k sku's). Most of the old pages have been indexed and drive the majority of our online sales. But, the updated products have different titles, H1's, etc and have been re-formatted for the better in terms of usability. So, should we redirect thousands of pages to the new pages? Will Google be ok with that?...or should we reformat the current url's with the new data? And, if we reformat current url's with new data...the fear is that the on-page elements that the pages are being pick up for will get wiped out, (be it the H1 in some cases or the title or alt tag for another, etc) because it's simply too much to retain them during the import. Please share
On-Page Optimization | | nisvision0 -
301 vs 302 redirect
Hello Mozers, I have a website which offers subscriptions on a monthly basis, when one profile expires the link of the profile gets a 301 redirect to the main category, just that if the member chooses to come back after a while he can reactivate the profile and the link will work again and the 301 will disappear, Should I be doing 302 redirect, as from this point of view it's only a temporarily redirect ? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | asmedia0 -
Boatload of 301 Redirects Question
We have a client that came to us and they recently did a site makeover. Previously they had all their pages in root directory including 75+ spammy article pages. On their makeover, they moved all the article pages into a directory and added 301 redirects. In going over their site we noticed they have redundant articles, like an article on blue-marble-article.htm and blue-marbles-article.htm Playing on singular and plural with dulpicate content for most part with exception to making it plural. If they have 75 articles, Id say 1/3 are actually somewhat original content. I would like to 301 redirect 2/3's of the articles to better re-written article pages but that would add a whole lot more 301 redirects. We would then have a 301 redirect from root directory to article directory, then another 301 redirect from spam article to new re-written article. My question is, would this be too many redirects for googlebot to sort through and would it be too confusing or send bad signals? Or should I create a new directory with all good articles and just redirect the entire old articles directory to the new one? Or just delete the redirects and old spammy directory and let those fall on a 404 error page. Id hate to lose 50-75 pages but I think its in fact those spammy pages that could be why the site fell from top of first page google to third page and now 10th page in a years time. I know, Im confused just typing this out. Hope it makes sense for some good feedback and advise. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0 -
301 Re-directing a page
Hi, My website is appearing on page 1 of Google for a specific keyword, however when clicking on the search result, the page is out of date. As a short term solution, I have 301 redirected the url to a more up to date page on my website and beginning to optimise the on page content of this new page Is there any recommendations on what to do with the old page that appears on page 1 Google - as the page title, meta description and url displayed is out of date? Any help, best practise would be great...
On-Page Optimization | | simonsw0