How long should I leave an existing web page up after a 301 redirect?

[ScottMcPherson]

I've been reading through a few of blog posts here on moz and can't seem to find the answer to these two questions:

How long should I leave an existing page up after a 301 redirect? The page old page is no longer needed but has pretty high page authority. If I take the old page down—the one that I'm redirecting from—immediately after I set up the 301 redirect, will link juice still be passed to the new page?

My second question is, right now, on my index.html page I have both a 301 redirect and a rel canonical tag in the head. They were both put in place to redirect and pass link equity respectively. I did this a couple years back after someone recommended that I do both just to be safe, but from what I've gathered reading the articles here on moz is that your supposed to pick one or the other depending on whether or not it's permanent.

Should I remove the rel conanical tag or would it be better to just leave it be?

[ScottMcPherson]

That's very helpful. And that article was a good read. Appreciate the help!

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Scott,

you should only have the canonical tag on the URL that represents the home page.

So if you are home page is www.mysite.com you would only have a canonical tag their

does that make sense?

Essentially you should not use the canonical tag on a page that is not going to be in Google's index

If you are already 301 redirecting your index.HTML using Regex or whatever method it will not need to tag in addition.

More info

http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

All the best,

Tom

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[ScottMcPherson]

One thing I kind of left out is that on my home page (index.htlm) my canonical is just set to www.mysite.com, and the redirect is just to redirect non-www request to www request. So I just wasn't sure if I should remove that canonical since the redirect is already taking care of it? Both the canonical and the redirect have been there for approximately about 2 years so the redirect already kicked in a long time ago.

I don't think that leaving the canonical there would devalue the page at all, but just want to get another opinion.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Scott,

If you are looking for somebody to confirm what Chris said I agree 100%.

If you are backlink has value keep it in place. As long as possible.

If you have done a redirect on a back link you know has no value meaning no one is going to it directly nor does it have any back links of any value pointing to it. Six months is a very safe cutoff time.

If you are doing a redesign you want to map your redirects

http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/06/02/how-to-retain-at-least-95-of-your-organic-traffic-after-a-site-redesign/

All the best,

Thomas

[Chris.Menke]

Scott,

Keep in mind that redirects happen at the server, before the user agent even gets to the page contents of a URL. That means that a rel=canonical tag on a page that has been redirected is not seen by the bot/user agent.  So, once redirected, the page of content that had been available at a URL is no longer accessible by anyone or anything on the web.  When Google sees the 301 redirect, it reassigns (most of) the value it had given to the original URL to the new URL.

If a URL has back links pointing to it and the URL is redirected,  the redirect should stay in place for as long as the back link has value.  If there are no back links pointing to a URL that has been redirected, 6 months is a safe bet for leaving the URL in place.  Here's Mat Cutts on that topic...