Huge httaccess with old 301 redirects. Is it safe to delete all redirects with no traffic in last 2 months?

[lcourse]

We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time.

There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years.

1. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ?
2. Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted?
3. Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?

[GastonRiera]

Hi there,

Does it represent a problem for you, having those redirects in the htaccess?
Personaly, and in a SEO perspective, I will never delete the 301s redirects done in any site.

The fact that those pages havent recieved traffic doesn't mean that the old URL might have any links or authority that is now redirected to the actual URL.

Here you have a Q&A question, answered by some experts:
How long should I keep the 301 redirect file - Moz Q&A

Hope it helps.
GR.

[lcourse]

The problem is: It is delaying server response time to 1,5 seconds on average and is increasing significantly server load. We are talking here about more than 19.ooo rows with hundreds of rewrite rules based on URL patterns. So we have a pressing need to take action.

Is there a way to easily identify those URLs that triggered a 301 in the last 2 months? Doing it based on the apache logs seems a bit daunting as I did not find a tool that filters from the apache logs the 301s. Can I get this information from analytics or any other way easily?

[Aleyda]

Hi there,

The best way to identify if it's already safe to eliminate the 301 redirects from a previous Web migration/redesign is to verify if the old pages (you need to have a list of those old URLs) that were redirected in the past:

1. Are still crawled and indexed? (You can check the indexation easily in Google with "site:" directly, and then if you identify these old URLs in Google Search Console Search Analytics, by filtering by pages). If so, which pages? Are they also ranking still well for relevant terms? Which ones? Identify why is still ranking instead of the new version of the page: Is the redirect correctly implemented? Going to a new version that is really relevant? The old pages being linked from internal or external sources that are passing high value? What's the historical and trend of crawling activity of those pages over time? Is it going down? (that you can analyze via logs).
2. Are still getting traffic? Identify which source: is it organic search traffic? referral from other sites? You can check this by verifying the URLs activity from the old site version in Google Analytics.
3. Are still being linked? A must if you're still ranking with these pages and traffic. Verify which sources are still linking to them and which are the one passing the highest value. Make the most to update these links to go to the new URL versions to stop passing value and traffic to the old URLs.

If you verify that these old URLs are not indexed, nor getting visibility or traffic anymore either from organic search or any other traffic source, then it's ok to eliminate the redirects.

Nonetheless, if they are still getting visibility & traffic you will need to keep the redirects, otherwise you will lose those visitors (and also give a bad user experience). The goal in this case would be to ask the previous questions among others to identify the reason why are they still being indexed, linked, etc. and update the relevant links, content, etc. to change this behavior and help Google to catch up with the URLs migrations.

I hope it helps

[lcourse]

Aleyda,  this is super useful , thanks a lot for this excellent advice. 
I will still need to do some research on how to best compile a comprehensive list of incoming links, as moz and search console data is still kind of limited for this purpose.