Removing redirects

[dpinion]

Greetings all,
Do you ever go back and remove old redirects? For example, you moved some pages to a new directory and redirected so that SE's wouldn't return 404 pages. Is it even necessary? It just seems like I am getting a lot of redirects in my htaccess and wonder if that would eventually hurt load times/anything? Or should I leave them all in?

If you remove them, what checks do you perform to ensure they are no longer needed?

[g1smd]

They should technically exist 'forever'.

In practise they could be removed once they get zero traffic from both visitors and spiders AND when there are zero incoming links with that old URL anywhere on the web.

I would wait a few years after the last visit before removal, as there are sporadic reports of Google re-crawling very old (no longer existing) URLs after a gap of many years.

[dpinion]

ok, thank you. Do you have any recommendations on .htaccess books? I have been going over the mod_rewrite manual and other web resources, but wouldn't mind having a couple of good books on the shelf. :)

[TheMadScientist]

Do you have any recommendations on .htaccess books?

This is the best one I've found:
Mod_Rewrite Book [google.com]

It's a Great Reference Manual...