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
-
How do I keep content-refreshment manageble for large site with facetted product categories?
Dear MOZ'ers,
On-Page Optimization | | Marketing-Omoda
i hope you can help me with the following issue: As a fashion e-commerce site we have a category structure by gender: , brand, product-category and colour. We sell over 250 brands in 50 categories. Off course, we don't sell products in every category for all brands but, in general, we sell 3 or 4 product categories for a brand. Next to this, we also have unique content for brand-product-gender (in fact this is the most common in our site-structure, since fashion is really a gender-based product.) We are planning to leave the site category as it is. we rank well for specific products like 'blue mens sneakers' My question is about copy, or more specific: to keep content-refreshment manageble. At the moment we have a small text at the top of the page and long form content on the bottom (very low below the fold, near the footer, only shown when the product-lister is) Because of seasonality in fashion, category text are regularly updated. As you can imagine, this is quit some work and pretty expensive. So now my question is: on which page level should you advice to have long form content, or distinctive content at all?
On the one hand I'm really sceptical about the value of the text at the bottom, on the other hand I am afraid that, should I decide to remove content from lower hierarchy pages, I might give the wrong signal to search engines: making my site from content rich content modest.0 -
After HTTPS upgrade, should I change all internal links, or a general 301 redirect is better?
I recently upgraded to https. Of course most internal links of my old posts are still http. So I set up a 301 redirect in order to make the old link works. In terms od SEO this is good or it is better to update all the internal links to https, manually? In that case can I do it in batch with a search/replace command in the phmyadmin database? any other suggested method? thank you
On-Page Optimization | | micvitale0 -
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 -
301 redirect www.brandname.com to www.brandname-keyword.com
It seems I've been reading about 301 for hours now, but I still didn't find an answer to my question, so I'm hoping someone can help me out here. I'm starting a new webshop which is relaunching a semi known brand within its specific niche, say kids toys. Now my question is - since the brand name is relatively known and it is only 5 letters short, the website will be www.xxxxx.com. However the brand name itself doesn't say anything about the products we sell, so I was thinking to buy www.xxxxx-toys.com and 301 redirect www.xxxxx.com to this new site, but still use the shorter version in all marketing material since it's a lot easier to type and remember. Apparently Google doesn't give extra juice to sites with keywords in the domain name anymore (?) but it would still say something about site to new customers unaware of the brand name. Any advice? 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | JaneVO0 -
Redirecting URLS on windows
Could anyone help out here please. A client of ours have reveloped their website from HTML to ASP (helpful!). They have 60 odd pages indexed in Google with the .html extension. We need to do a redirect on these pages so that all link juice is passed to the new pages. What would be the best way to do this please?
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
301 internal redirects
Hello, I have a lot of low quality pages on my site, many of which have very similar URLs and cover similar topics. I want to tidy up my site by using 301 redirects as Rand suggests here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization 1. As a rough rule of thumb, how many internal 301 redirects is too many? 2. Can lots be to the homepage if they're relevant? (I could have as many as 30) Thanks, Kevin
On-Page Optimization | | KMack0 -
Should I fix 302 redirects?
I have a Magento ecommerce site that allows customers to compare products. When SEOmoz crawled the site, it came back with over 6,000 302 redirect errors related to the compare products feature. Is this harming our rankings? And any suggestions on the best way to fix it?
On-Page Optimization | | AmazingPlans0 -
Necessary to redirect non-www to www?
Hello All, I've read quite a bit on here and the Matt Cutts blog http://mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ about non-www vs www. I''ve also read a few recent posts on here but still left a little confused. First, my site is PR 4. We don't have many links, but the ones we do have (including internal) point to the www.example.com. You can also get to our site by typing example.com and it will not switch to the www. version. Both versions have the PR4, I just want to make sure I'm not losing any PR or juice between the different versions. My question, would you advise 301 redirect to the www version? if so, I have Godaddy as our host, is it as simple as going into the hosting control and doing the redirect there?
On-Page Optimization | | someoneguy0