301 redirects- how long to keep and how many are too many?

[lauramrobinson32]

Hi, I was told we have way too many 301 redirects on our site. We have some that have been there for 3 years. Our site is datacard.com . Question- how long should you keep a redirect out there when building a new page and expiring an old page? Is it 6 months, is it a certain time frame? wondering what the best practices are?

Thanks!

Laura

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Your redirect file shouldn't be changed. Leave that as is.

I would update your internal links and sitemap as soon as possible, especially if they contain redirects.

I would also perform a backlink audit and make sure you update valuable links and remove/disavow irrelevant/toxic links.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[BradsDeals]

I don't think that too many 301's is actually a thing. Seriously, why would you want to put a cap on getting visitors to the right pages? It doesn't make much sense.

However, not all 301s are necessary. If Google has indexed the new URL and the old one doesn't have any valuable backlinks, you can let those 404 with very little risk. But I would only do it if for some weird technical reason you just could not keep the 301.

[MattRoney]

Just wanted to chime in that I've also never heard of too many 301s being a thing.

EDIT: ...unless you mean you have too many redirects in a row, but that's not what it sounds like. Is that what you mean, Laura?

[TheeDigital]

Keep the redirects forever unless you want lost value! Too many redirects is subjective and I would recommend determining what you consider to be too many based on how long it takes your server to process the file on each page load with strace. If this number is unacceptable, consider other options besides .htaccess such as moving the redirects to the config file so they are processed on server load rather than each page load.

[Linda-Vassily]

It is not unusual to redirect a whole website and all of its pages, so it wouldn't make sense that you could have too many. And you should keep the redirects indefinitely--what if there is a link to the expired page? You do not want to lose that equity by having it go nowhere...