When can I remove 301 Redirect

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Hi All,

For one of my client site, we had put 301 redirect on almost all the pages.

- I wanted to know if I can drop the 301 redirect at any stage (say after 2-3 months)?
- Will this not reduce the number of backlinks that were already created on old URLs and are now transferring the PR to new pages?
- Will this affect my rankings (assuming rankings were back after 1-2 month of redirection)

Let me know if there is already a post on this topic.

Thanks
Ankit

[phranque]

a 301 means "Moved Permanently".

as Receptional once said, A link is forever, not just for Christmas [webmasterworld.com].

[Pico_Train]

301 PERMANENT redirect - so the answer is never unless you are completely changing the site to something entirely new to what it was and want to start from scratch?

[steveb]

301 means moved permanently, not that you have to keep some bit of code in your htaccess for fifty years.

If the bots have picked it up, take it off whenever you want, but there really isn't any reason you should "want" to.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Thanks everyone for your quick replies

Thanks
Ankit

[vero]

I would keep the 301 forever. Even if it isn't needed for the spiders, there may be sites out there that you don't know about who linked to the old URL. If you keep the 301, people will be able to get to the new page. If not, they'll just get a 404.

[rainborick]

If nothing else, you could monitor your server logs for a couple of months to see which of these 301's are still being triggered by requests for the obsolete URLs and where the requests are coming from. At some point, you should be able to determine which of them are no longer necessary or useful.

[LucindaRuth]

In my experience, if you still have links out there pointing to the old URL, then Google will reindex it (and reduce the backlink count for the new site) as soon as you drop the 301. nothing is "permanent" at google apparently. Once all the links are changed then you can drop the 301.

[Robert Charlton]

I wanted to know if I can drop the 301 redirect at any stage (say after 2-3 months)?

As LucindaRuth correctly mentions, you need to keep the redirect up as long is there's a link out there anywhere on the web pointing to your old URL.

Will this not reduce the number of backlinks that were already created on old URLs and are now transferring the PR to new pages?

This part of your question is based on a common misconception about 301s... that links on an old page have some sort of life of their own, even after that page has been redirected. Once you permanently redirect your old pages, Google no longer sees the content on them. If you use .htaccess to redirect, you can take the old pages down after they've been redirected. They effectively cease to exist. So, Google won't see those old links... they're no longer transferring PR to anything.

Links on your new pages are what's transferring PR to your other new pages. Your new site architecture and new external inbounds take over.

The purpose of 301s to your old urls is allow links that continue to exist on the web to be followed. 301s also allow bookmarks to be followed.

Generally, before changing a page url, I use both Yahoo Site Explorer as well as Google to find all the backlinks I can find to that page. If there are external inbounds to the page, I list them and do my best after the page is moved to get those links changed.

If there aren't any external inbounds to the page, and the page doesn't rank, and there's no reason to expect the page to be bookmarked, then there's generally no point redirecting it.

[keepontruckin]

I don't understand why googlebot keeps asking for a page that is removed from the site and has a 301 redirect to the new page. There is no external link to the page anywhere on the web. In the apache log file I can see 5 instances of googlebot asking for the page in the past 2 months.
66.249.73.8 - - [26/Jan/2008:03:19:30 -0500] "GET /[url] HTTP/1.1" 301 440 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.8 - - [01/Feb/2008:08:03:38 -0500] "GET /[url]" 301 440 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.8 - - [09/Feb/2008:13:16:36 -0500] "GET /[url]" 301 440 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.8 - - [13/Feb/2008:02:49:16 -0500] "GET /[url]" 301 440 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.8 - - [18/Feb/2008:16:35:23 -0500] "GET /[url]" 301 440 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Why doesn't googlebot just obey the 301 and remove it from the index or queue of pages to index?

[jimbeetle]

Why doesn't googlebot just obey the 301 and remove it from the index or queue of pages to index?

That's why the redirect should be kept in place permanently, Google doesn't like to throw anything away. Same with 404s and 410s, it will keep requesting them, albeit less frequently over time, just to check if they happened to be resurrected.

[minnapple]

Google cannot and should not log a 301 as a permanent modification because of probability of changes in domains names and/or urls over the span of years

[mack]

I agree, if you have changed your domain there is a chance you may wish to use the old domain for something different. if google didn't bother to check back the new site on your old domain would be doomed.

Mack.