301 redirects for individual products - should I keep the old ones?

[jsigwid]

Hello

We are just now starting up a niche site that will be the new home for a large group of products from an old site. Apart from straight up informative text links, we have set up 301 redirects for the 100 most important products from the old to the new site. Right now, we are in a transition period where we openly tell our visitors that we have a new site for this certain group of products.

My question is: for how long should we keep the products on the old site? Can we remove them straight away, since our intentions of the 301 redirects is to preserve the serp positions for the most important products? Does it matter to google if we let the products remain on the old site for a while?

Regards
Oskar

[therealmarkhall]

If you set up a 301redirect  then theold  page will automatically redirect to the new page with imediaite effect, therefore rendering the old page useless I belive?

Are the pages you have 301'd linked from around the old site? If so I would keep them there in order to maximise conversion from users visiting these pages from searching within the site and from organic listings.

I don't belive there is a penatly for leaving the pages live... that said im not certain.

For me at least It would of been better to build the new site and populate it offline, then make the switch with 301's on every page in one swoop so there is no confusion.

[HiveDigitalInc]

I would leave them on the old site with the 301 redirect for as long as possible. Assuming it is not cost prohibitive to keep the old site up, the last thing you want to happen is to let your old domain drop and have someone else pick it up or pull the old product pages and have Google now think that those URLs should be 404'd rather than 301'd

[baptisteplace]

I would recommend keeping the old page forever, if possible, with the 301 to the new site.

For the products which were not redirected, I would add the 301 over time or put a link to the site with appropriate text in the top of the content. These pages need to be kept forever if possible.

Google can keep the pages in the index for months or even years if they have backlinks, so you should keep the 301.

Example for the NYTimes :

Q: A 301 REDIRECT QUESTION! How long do you leave up the redirect?

Forever.

Marshall managing 301s forever isn't easy but necessary. We've moved entire parts of NYT movies and understand we have to manage 8 million redirects for ever. If tech doesn't understand don't move forward

_source : http://www.seroundtable.com/smxw11-seo-tech-13054.html_

[Goetzman]

I agree with forever, who knows in 2 years if people still link on the old pages

[jsigwid]

So you're saying I can delete the products as long as I have a 301 for the missing page? That is, the 301 is always interpreted before a 404?

[baptisteplace]

You can't have 2 HTTP codes on a page.

I don't know what platform you are using for your products, but I would delete everything on the old site and put one (or several) scripts that does nothing but redirect 301 to the new site corresponding page.

This requires some programming skills, htaccess + regular expressions and this should be done