Does it really matter to maintain 301 redirect after de-indexing of old URLs?

[CommercePundit]

Today, I was reading latest blog post on SEOmoz blog about. Uncrawled 301s - A Quick Fix for When Relaunches Go Too Well

This is very interesting study about 301 & How it useful to maintain traffic. I'm working on eCommerce website and I have done similar stuff on my website. I have big confusion to manage 301 redirect.

My website generates new URLs due to following actions.

1. Re-write dynamic URLs.
2. Re-launch entire website on different eCommerce platform. [osCommerce to Magento Commerce]
3. Re-name category.
4. Trasfer one product from one category to another category.

I'm managing my 301 redirect with old practice. Excel sheet data from Google webmaster tools and set specific new URLs for redirect. Hoooo... Now, I have 8.5K redirect in htaccess... And, I'm thinking it's too much.

Can we remove old 301 redirect from htaccess or not? This is big question for me. Because, all pages are not hyperlink on external website. Google have just de-indexed old URLs and indexed new URLs. So, Is it require to maintain 301 redirect after Google process?

[EGOL]

Let's say that my website has ten links to your old URLs that deliver hundreds of visitors per day.

What will happen to all of those visitors if  you remove the 301 redirects?

[CommercePundit]

Oh Jesus... This is strong reason Why I'm your big fan since a member on SEO Chat forum. I got your point. OR We can edit hyperlink on external website by email them... Right?

[j0a0vargas]

In my view it is important to keep the old redirects, even after you have of replacing the Google index. With the 301 the relevance obtained in the old page, keep to the new page. The 301 is not only to Google index, but also backlinks your page has.

I consider that 8.5 k is not so big, I have sites with 20k and never had any problems or restrictions.

Anyway, if you want to remove the old ones, let the 404 page beautiful, which is always good: D

[CommercePundit]

No, I don't want to create romance on my website with 404. EGOL & you have mentioned same about visitors and back links. Now, I have some good feeling after reading 20K redirect which is maintain by you. 8.5K is not big for me.

[EGOL]

I have 301 redirects on my sites.   Every one that I have done is still out there in htaccess.  I am not taking chances on how search engines handle these.

Other than deleting useless pages, I rarely change URLs.  If I don't change URLs I don't have to worry about this stuff.

I have not emailed other sites to change the URL in their links.  I have only changed the URLs on my own sites.  I would worry that asking someone to edit a link might result in a loss... so I am happy with the redirected link.

[CommercePundit]

My ecommerce [www.vistastores.com] website does not have issue due to change or URLs. I rarely change category page URLs and product page URLs. But, I'm facing issue due to narrow by search. If any attribute will remove from narrow by search so 100 pages will convert to 404 due to dynamic structure. That's why I'm setting up 301 redirect to category page URLs from all dynamic pages.

I have concern to reduce 301 redirect and broken links in website. But, I'm not able to stop it. Google may restrict my organic performance due to continue broken links on website and non associated 301 redirect.

[FXDD]

Hi Egol. I am migrating a site with 6k pages. About 2K pages are useless old syndication articles with no incoming links; about 50 are old CID version of forms. These pages won't exist in the new site. How do I delete them, by no doing 301 redirect and not including them in any sitemap? Would they become 404 for a while and then disappear from google index?

[EGOL]

I always use a 301 redirect.

2K is a lot of pages.  If I can redirect them with a couple lines of htaccess code I would do it.  If I had to code 2K lines and have that huge file scanned for thousands of visitors I might not do it if I am pretty sure that there is very little traffic.

I use lots of folders on my site and that makes these problems easy to solve.