Is there a limit for 301 redirection in htaccess file?

[Naghirniac]

For the SEO perspective, there is a limit for the number of 301 redirection inside the htaccess file?

[Vizergy]

Hi Naghirniac,

This is a very general question.  As far as a limit the answer would have to be no, there is no limit.  However, what is going on here?  Are you rebuilding a very large website and attempting to consolidate pages?  Be sure you are pointing old URLs to pages that are very relevant to the old content or you will surely see rankings fall for those pages.  Also, do the old URLs have lots of backlinks?  You may consider contacting the webmasters of the websites that link to your old pages and told of the change so they can update their links to point to the new pages, at least for the more important links – the 301’s will pass most of the juice, but not all.

Hope this helps,

Vizergy

[Highland]

The simple answer is no. Let's say you have page A and 301 it to page B. As soon as Googlebot gets the 301 (might take a bit longer but for argument's sake we'll say it's instant) it drops page A and indexes page B. As the ranking process moves along (which is slower than indexation) most, if not all, of the PR that A had is now moved to B.

Google can't read your htaccess file (Apache will not show any page with a period as the first character in the filename for security reasons) and I've not heard of any long term penalties from changing URLs. Just realize that there is a gap (days or weeks) between the time that Google notes A moved and B is ranked like A was.