301 Redirects question

[Ridge]

A couple months ago I changed my url structure and added 301's to my .htacess file. Everything was re-indexed pretty quick, and now my .htacess is a huge messy file. So, I thought it might be time to delete those old redirects.

How long should I leave them in place? Just until they get re-indexed? Is it ok to delete them?

[Trikkur]

This is something I've also wondered. In my opinion, as long as there are no links pointing to those specific pages, you can probably remove the 301, once it's out of googles index. If there are any links you bought going to those subpages, you should keep the 301 in place.

I'm not 100% about this though, so it would be great to hear other opinions as well.

[Ridge]

Ah good point, I didn't think about those other links,

[themike537]

I've heard 6 months, but yes if you have old links pointing to those pages you'll have to leave it there until those links are changed to the new pages.

[GregW]

I looked to see if you could use some sort of include to import an external file containing the redirects in the .htaccess to tidy it up (like you do with php), but it doesn't seem to be possible.

I'm in the process of setting up a few redirects in the .htaccess at the moment. The most useful thing for me whilst doing this is adding comments to help keep everything as tidy as I can. Just use a # at the start of a line to make a comment. Like this:

# redirects set1

Redirect 301 /old-page.html http://www.site.com/new-page/
Redirect 301 /old-page.html http://www.site.com/new-page/
Redirect 301 /old-page.html http://www.site.com/new-page/

[Marcelo]

I always wondered this. If you search for links to your old structure and can't find them, I think it would be ok to do the move.