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How long can we keep 301, 410 redirects?

by shaunm
9 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi,

We have a large number of 301, 410 redirects. I would like to know how long we can keep these redirects? Is there any time limit that I can keep until? How do you perform managing/cleaning of redirects in your website?

Any help, guys?


Thanks a lot!
#301 #410 #long #redirects
  • Profile picture of the author jxam69
    A 301 redirect is used to indicate that the location of a document has permanently moved to a new location - IE it has a different URL which is permanent. Therefore it should be left in place forever. Over time search engines will only refer to the new URL (when they work correctly - but that's another story) so you might be tempted to remove the 301 redirect - don't do it because other sites which have linked to you with the old URL may not (usually won't) become aware of the new document location and will continue linking to the old URL.

    There is no limit to the amount of time you can keep a 301 redirect - that's what 'permanent' means. Disk space is cheap - why would you delete a 301?

    Returning a 410 status is a different kettle of fish entirely. This is not intended for redirecting, and should never be used for that purpose. A 410 says "This document is permanently removed - it will never come back - it doesn't exist anywhere else."
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    • Profile picture of the author shaunm
      @jxam69 Thank you so much the insightful answering!
      But my concern is that, whatever redirect it is, it's going to increase the page load time for a user. So we thought of cleaning all that 301 redirects in a periodic basis.
      other sites which have linked to you with the old URL may not (usually won't) become aware of the new document location and will continue linking to the old URL.
      I will make sure that, I am not going to remove any URLs which has been linked from various external resources.

      So if I want to go ahead with the current project, how long should I wait before removing a redirect? Should I wait till the new URL getting crawled? Should I update the sitemap so that the old URL is not crawled?

      Can you help me from Search Engine point of view?

      Thanks,
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      • Profile picture of the author dburk
        Originally Posted by shaunm View Post

        @jxam69 Thank you so much the insightful answering!
        But my concern is that, whatever redirect it is, it's going to increase the page load time for a user. So we thought of cleaning all that 301 redirects in a periodic basis.
        Hi shaunm,


        If you delete 301 redirects, in many cases you will tank your Search engine rankings. Generally, that would be an incredible bad idea, however there are situations that might need to be cleaned up.

        For example, if you had thousands of URLs redirected and were using mod_rewrite in you htaccess file, and had all of those URLs individually listed, it could increase the load time and that should be rectified. However, the best way to rectify that is not to remove the URL redirects but use a different method of redirection to improve the efficiency of page loads.

        You could use a script that calls an optimized server query, or a clever regular expression. Permanent redirects are meant to be permanent, not temporary, therefore they generally should stay in place as long as your website remains active.
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        • Profile picture of the author shaunm
          @Don
          Thank you so much! It was really helpful for me.

          By the way we are using a ".config" file to specify all our redirects, of course using regular expression.

          We wanted to clean them up because the list getting bigger every month. Apart from that, when a user request a deleted/moved page, the server responds with the 301 and redirect the visitor to the new destination. As such the visitor need to wait at least 2 more sec for the new destination. We are not sure how many visitors are going to get away from the page as they are waiting for the page to load.

          So what I thought was, once the pages are not crawled and indexed by Google, after making sure that the particular URL is not linked from anywhere outside/inside sources, we can simply remove that old URL and the 301 redirect. By doing this, we can avoid having to maintain the huge list of redirects in a spreadsheet and updating them.

          Is that not wiser? Can you please help me better handle this?


          Thanks a lot for all your help!


          Best,
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          • Profile picture of the author dburk
            Hi shaunm,

            Is it not better for a user to wait 2 seconds rather than get a missing page error? Also important is that any lingering backlinks that point traffic to that missing URL may not go away for a long time.

            A better path forward is to select URL names that tend to not become obsolete, wherever possible. Optimize your script for redirecting deleted URLs, there is no reason that it should take an extra 2 seconds to process a list of fewer than 10000 obsolete URLs, if it is more than that switch to a database query with optimzed indexes and it shouldn't take more than a half a second to process a list of 500,000 URLs.
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            • Profile picture of the author shaunm
              @Donnie,

              Thanks a lot ) Seriously I don't see a button to thank you, though. May be it's because I am a newbie in this forum?

              I very much appreciate your patience in answering my questions.

              Is it not better for a user to wait 2 seconds rather than get a missing page error? Also important is that any lingering backlinks that point traffic to that missing URL may not go away for a long time.
              Definitely not! But can I remove the 301 redirects once I am sure that they have no incoming links anymore? And put a 410 "gone" for those URLs?

              And can you please elaborate the following a little bit for me? please?

              A better path forward is to select URL names that tend to not become obsolete, wherever possible. Optimize your script for redirecting deleted URLs, there is no reason that it should take an extra 2 seconds to process a list of fewer than 10000 obsolete URLs

              Best,
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              • Profile picture of the author dburk
                Originally Posted by shaunm View Post

                @Donnie,

                Thanks a lot ) Seriously I don't see a button to thank you, though. May be it's because I am a newbie in this forum?

                I very much appreciate your patience in answering my questions.



                Definitely not! But can I remove the 301 redirects once I am sure that they have no incoming links anymore? And put a 410 "gone" for those URLs?
                Hi shaunm,

                If you are sure there are no longer any links, and that no one has ever bookmarked the page, then I see no problem in removing the 301 Permanent Redirect. However, in that circumstance it would also be pointless to add a 410 Gone status code, right?


                Originally Posted by shaunm View Post

                And can you please elaborate the following a little bit for me? please?
                This is a topic that has been discussed by webmasters for years, and the official standards body for the web, W3C, has some specific recommendations for this issue:

                Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don't change.

                And here is what Google has posted about Google friendly URL structure:
                URL structure - Webmaster Tools Help

                HTH
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    • Profile picture of the author MarvyDery
      Originally Posted by jxam69 View Post

      A 301 redirect is used to indicate that the location of a document has permanently moved to a new location - IE it has a different URL which is permanent. Therefore it should be left in place forever. Over time search engines will only refer to the new URL (when they work correctly - but that's another story) so you might be tempted to remove the 301 redirect - don't do it because other sites which have linked to you with the old URL may not (usually won't) become aware of the new document location and will continue linking to the old URL.

      There is no limit to the amount of time you can keep a 301 redirect - that's what 'permanent' means. Disk space is cheap - why would you delete a 301?

      Returning a 410 status is a different kettle of fish entirely. This is not intended for redirecting, and should never be used for that purpose. A 410 says "This document is permanently removed - it will never come back - it doesn't exist anywhere else."
      thank you so much as i also need an answer to this question
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  • Profile picture of the author Arctek
    A note on 410 response codes: I had a site with over 40k broken links as a result of identifying and removing a whole lot of infinite pages. These were returning 404s and going no where, I since changed the response code to 410 Gone and has dropped this down to ~1.5k in webmaster tools.

    You mileage may vary, but if you have a whole stack of pages you can't get rid of from webmaster tools, try a 410 instead.
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