How long do you leave re-directs on for

[Chris Ashdown]

Changed site design a while ago and did re-directs, question is how long do you leave them in the .htaccess file, 3 month, 6 month or what?

 

[josnorgren]

Depends (how long is a while ago though?). Are people still linking to you at your old .htm pages? Then you should keep the 301s in place. There's no need to clean up your .htaccess.

 

[Storebuilder]

Hi Chris,
If the redirects are simply telling a search engine the page has been moved then you can remove them after those pages have been re-indexed.

If you have other traffic sources then just leave them.

Most importantly add a comment line like this:
## Redirect this section to new blog

above your .htaccess additions so that you know why they are there. Will be useful when you want to understand why something doesn't work in a years time!

 

[antropy]

Why not just leave them there? You never know if someone has a bookmark etc. and there's no harm leaving them.

 

[CambridgeLocalMarketing]

I personally never delete redirects from the htaccess file. What purpose do you want to achieve by removing them?

 

[Mark_Taylor_]

Check webmaster tools, or just leave them as mentioned above, you may still benefit from old external links and bookmarks.

Only remove them if you have literally thousands, like one of my clients :-(
We had to remove loads as even with regular expressions we had so many that it was having a small but noticeable effect of TTFB speeds.... and it was an utter nightmare to manage that many.

 

[KM-Tiger]

we had so many that it was having a small but noticeable effect of TTFB speeds....

Yes, I've got one with 1400 lines in .htaccess.

It's the nature of .htaccess that the file is read each and every time the directory is accessed. It would have no other way of knowing if the file had changed.

If you have control of the server you can mitigate that by putting the rewrites into the vHost configuration, or use an include file. That way it will be read into memory once only on start up.

 

[Mark_Taylor_]

If you have control of the server you can mitigate that by putting the rewrites into the vHost configuration, or use an include file. That way it will be read into memory once only on start up.

I think we had over 2500 at on point... and we also had a load of internally managed (within Magento) 301 redirects, it was redirect loop heaven haha.

 

[webprojectuk]

If you have a lot of back links going to these pages then leave them as a 301 redirects. At the moment it looks like google is passing some link juice via the 301.