I have an eCommerce store with a lot of 301 redirects. Would that hurt my rankings?

[shabbirun]

I use BigCommerce, and they have a system where all the URLs are dynamically generated from the name of each product. So if I named a product "widget x y z" the url would be /widget-x-y-z/, and if I changed that to "blue widget x y z", it would change to /blue-widget-x-y-z/ and automatically redirect the old one to the new one.

As a result, in 6 months, because of a lot of tweaking and experimenting, I've ended up with a hefty list of 400 redirects. Some of them are very old, and some are recent. So my question is in two parts:

a) does having all of these redirects hurt my rankings?

b) if so, would deleting them help?

[Chris_CM]

Having the redirects in place should not harm you in any way unless you are chaining them, just watch this Matt Cutts video about the limits on redirects.

Regards,

Chris Wilson