How long keep 301 redirects?

[Manifestation]

Our site has been updated twice in the past 6 years with new, better urls.

Initially we did 301 redirects 3 years ago for the url redirects.

Recently some of those redirected pages have been redirected again.

Question: How long before it's time to have the old, original urls removed through Google?

And, once that is done, how long to wait before removing the older redirects from the htaccess file?

Appreciate any feedback/insights on this matter.

[EGOL]

If you remove a redirect for a URL and a link to that URL on another website still points to that old URL,  then any visitors who click that link will hit a 404 page.  My old redirects will still be there when I attend my funeral.   The lesson to learn is don't change your URLs unless absolutely necessary.

[Highland]

It really depends on the source of your traffic. If the source of your traffic are old links or direct traffic (i.e. they typed the URL), I'd leave them forever (provided you can't get them updated). It's bad form to drop a redirect from an old page when new users can find old links that appear useful. A good example for me was weather.com, which recently updated their site URL structure and refused to 301 from the old to the new (old page would 404). So for me, who had bookmarked my local weather page, I now had to go back to their home page and search all over again and THEN I was back at my local weather. It was annoying when 301s are cheap and easy.

If all your traffic comes from search engines then I would say you can drop them after a year or so. That's more than enough time for the index to update and the old URLs to fade out.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

You can also go through old backlinks that point to the old URLs and update those accordingly so that your new URLs are getting the full effect.

Hope this helps - good luck!

[Manifestation]

Well if the internet was a static entity than leaving the original urls in place is an option. The original urls were optimized using the guidelines of the day ... today, however, they would be considered spam ... hence the change. At least the 404 page gets them back to the site.

Appreciate your input.

[Manifestation]

Most of the traffic is from organic and craigslist. Some of the original pages were redirected over 3 years ago, so removing them now won't be a problem.

Thanks

[Manifestation]

Amazing, thanks for the information and the attached article. It's more than useful.

Thanks for sharing