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You are here: Home / Google / Google: Best Practices for 301s in Large Htaccess Files

Google: Best Practices for 301s in Large Htaccess Files

April 27, 2016 at 4:21 am PST By Jennifer Slegg

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301 large htaccessSomeone raised an interesting question on Twitter today… what to do about older 301 redirects, especially when the redirect file begins to get a bit long and complicated.  Could they be deleted after a time?  Or should you keep them in their massive files with the potential server slowdown for visitors?

@Trey_Collier if the new page is already indexed, you can remove the old one.

— Gary Illyes (@methode) April 27, 2016

Gary Illyes from Google said that once the new page is indexed, it could be removed.  Of course, this is purely from a technical standpoint of when can you remove a 301. Sites do not need to keep up 301 redirects up for eternity in order for Google to figure out old pages should be matched with a specific brand new one.

However, it obviously goes well beyond that too.  Keeping those 301 redirects if any of the older pages have incoming links to them or actual visitors redirecting through them, then obviously keeping those 301 redirects is the best practice.

@methode @Trey_Collier Do make sure that none of those old pages get actual visitors/links. If any do, you should keep 301s active 🙂

— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) April 27, 2016

Illyes followed up with clarification as well, from a best practices point of view:

@Trey_Collier 1/2 ok, the BEST practice is to keep the redirects indefinitely, but that's not always feasible (i.e. site moves) @jenstar

— Gary Illyes (@methode) April 27, 2016

@Trey_Collier 2/2 so removing the redirects after signals were passed (i.e. new page indexed and serves for old url) is fine @jenstar

— Gary Illyes (@methode) April 27, 2016

Now depending on the size, having a super long .htaccess file can slow down the server… but again the size isn’t the only factor in the equation, because the server itself also plays a role, and a server’s performance can also vary greatly.

Bottom line, if you have a 301 redirect, you can remove it once Google has crawled it and matched up the old page with the new one.  But if you can leave it indefinitely, that is the best route to go, especially if you need to redirect linking signals or actual visitors to the new page.  Then you never have to worry about losing those older ranking signals or landing visitors onto a 404 page rather than the page they wanted to go to.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.
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Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)

  • 2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates - August 1, 2022
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Filed Under: Google, SEO

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Comments

  1. Travis Pflanz says

    April 27, 2016 at 9:21 pm

    Using the MOZ Open Site Explorer (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose), I’m sure a lot of websites can find a lot of unnecessary 301 redirects to delete

Trackbacks

  1. SearchCap: Google merchant feed, Getty Images EU complaint & more says:
    April 27, 2016 at 1:01 pm

    […] Google: Best Practices for 301s in Large Htaccess Files, thesempost.com […]

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