Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can I remove 301 redirects after some time?
-
Hello,
We have an very large number of 301 redirects on our site and would like to find a way to remove some of them.
Is there a time frame after which Google does not need a 301 any more? For example if A is 301 redirected to B, does Google know after a while not to serve A any more, and replaces any requests for A with B?
How about any links that go to A?
Or: Is the only option to have all links that pointed to A point to B and then the 301 can be removed after some time?
Thank you for you you help!
-
Thank you both for your answers, I really appreciate, they are very helpful!
-
Why do you think there are too many 301 redirects? There is no limit to how many 301 redirects you can have and I'm not sure why you think removing them will 'ease download times'.
Your concern about the links is correct. If you remove the 301s then you lose the value that these links are passing through the redirect.
I'd love to know who these 'experts' are because I've never heard of that. Sounds completely made up and, to my knowledge, is incorrect.
I would suggest you take a look at Google's explanation about 301 redirects as it could prove informative to you.
-
Thank you for your reply.
We want to get rid of the 301s as there are just too many. Our site was not set up with lots of strategy, and it takes hundresds of 301's to consolidate.
The reason to get rif of them is to ease management, and to ease download time.
My concern is not only the 404s it is the links that go to the pages that where 301.
I have heard from some experts that it is ok to remove the 301s as once Google realizes one page is permanently redirected to another it keeps a recod to it and the 301 i sno longer needed. I am not sure that is correct.
Thank you!
-
Streamline is right that you should keep the 301 redirects in place so that any links pointing to the old pages pass value through the redirect to the new pages.
Is there a time frame after which Google does not need a 301 any more? For example if A is 301 redirected to B, does Google know after a while not to serve A any more, and replaces any requests for A with B?
Simply put, no. If you remove the 301 redirect then any requests for page A will return page A and not B.
How about any links that go to A?
These links will now be passing all their value to page A.
Or: Is the only option to have all links that pointed to A point to B and then the 301 can be removed after some time?
If it is possible for you to change all links that point to A, to then point to B, then maybe. However, it is very unlikely you will be able to do this and it will be extremely time consuming.
In short, your best option is to leave the 301 redirects in place as best SEO practice.
-
May I ask why you wish to remove the redirects? If other sites are linking to any of your old pages, then you should leave the 301 redirects in place since the search engines will likely crawl those links only to discover a 404 page.
Otherwise, you could go ahead and try removing the 301 redirects and monitor Google Webmaster Tools to see if Google encounters any 404 pages. If you do see the 404s start increasing, then you'll know that you should probably put the 301 redirects back in place.
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
-
Google is still indexing the old domain a year after 301 redirects are put in place
Hi there, You might have experienced this before but for me this is the first. A client of mine moved from domain A (www.domainA.com) to domain B (www.domainB.com). 301 redirects are all in place for over a year. But the old domain is still showing in Google when you search for "site:domainA.com" The HTTP Header check shows this result for the URL https://www.domainA.com/company/cookie-policy.aspx HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently =>
Technical SEO | | iQi
Cache-Control => private
Content-Length => 174
Content-Type => text/html; charset=utf-8
Location => https://www.domain_B_.com/legal/cookie-policy
Server => Microsoft-IIS/10.0
X-AspNetMvc-Version => 5.2
X-AspNet-Version => 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By => ASP.NET
Date => Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:01:33 GMT
Connection => close Does the redirect look wrong? The change of address request was made on Google Console when the website was moved over a year ago. Edit: Checked the domainA.com on bing and it seems that its not indexed, and replaced with domainB.com, which is the right. Just Google is indexing the old domain! Please let me know your thoughts on why this is happening. Best,0 -
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
Proper 301 redirect code for http to https
I see lots of suggestions on the web for forwarding http to https. I've got several existing sites that want to take advantage of the SSL boost for SEO (however slight) and I don't want to lose SEO placements in the process. I can force all pages to be viewed through the SSL - that's no problem. But for SEO reasons, do I need to do a 301 redirect line of code for every page in the site to the new "https" version? Or is there a way to catch all with one line of code that Google, etc. will recognize & honor?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith10 -
Can you use multiple videos without sacrificing load times?
We're using a lot of videos on our new website (www.4com.co.uk), but our immediate discovery has been that this has a negative impact on load times. We use a third party (Vidyard) to host our videos but we also tried YouTube and didn't see any difference. I was wondering if there's a way of using multiple videos without seeing this load speed issue or whether we just need to go with a different approach. Thanks all, appreciate any guidance! Matt
Technical SEO | | MattWatts1 -
Should 301-ed links be removed from sitemap?
In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn811 -
301 redirect relative or absolute path?
Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
Technical SEO | | Silviu
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
S.0 -
Creating a CSV file for uploading 301 redirect URL map
Hi if i'm bulk uploading 301 redirects whats needed to create a csv file? is it just a case of creating an excel spreadsheet & have the old urls in column A and new urls in column B and then just convert to csv and upload ? or do i need to put in other details or paremeters etc etc ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
200 Redirects for SEO instead of 301
We are working with a company on re-platforming our website. On a call yesterday they outlined a strategy to use 200 redirects for our top keywords instead of 301s. I am not familiar with this type of redirect and was wondering if anyone could provide some more insight.
Technical SEO | | EvergladesDirect0