7 replies to this topic

[lister]

Let me start by saying thanks to everyone who answered all my other 301 questions - you guys have all been VERY helpful.

Regarding my re-launch of my site to a new hosting provider - this will mean that I am going to have to 301 literally EVERY page - many that have been indexed....this totals about 200 or so pages....

Is this going to look suspicious to search engines - any reason why they would think this to be suspicious?

Fact is that I need to re-launch to grow so I figure better to take a slight step back for a leap forward right?

Thanks

[Jill]

Is this going to look suspicious to search engines - any reason why they would think this to be suspicious?

What would be suspicious about it?

You have new URLs, you need the old ones to go to them. End of story.

[Michael Martinez]

I wouldn't say that's the end of story. The server's performance will be affected more and more as you add content to an .htaccess file such as 301 redirects (the file has to be parsed for every request that the server receives).

You may be able to reduce the processing load by using RedirectMatch instead of Redirect. The RedirectMatch will redirect pages on the basis of expression matching. It's more flexible than a simple Redirect. It depends on where you are redirecting your old URLs to whether you want to use explicit Redirects or a more generalized RedirectMatch.

[madams]

Michael

How long should one leave redirects in place?

I changed my site a year ago and redirected all the old url,s to the new ones.

I guess the new pages are all indexed now.

Should I delete the redirects now from the .htaccess? Or just leave it as it is.

Thanks...

[Michael Martinez]

You could disable the redirects for a few weeks and see how much traffic is pointing toward the old URLs. If no links exist for an old URL, it's unlikely that you still need a redirect after a year.

[chrishirst]

How long should one leave redirects in place?

While ever external links exist to your pages.

[Jill]

How long should one leave redirects in place?

I would leave them forever unless there's some other reason you need to remove them.

[qwerty]

I changed my site a year ago and redirected all the old url,s to the new ones.

I guess the new pages are all indexed now.

If you're not sure, check. We sometimes 301 thousands, maybe tens of thousands of URLs in a single shot (whether I personally agree that it's a good idea or not) and it can take quite a long time for all of those changes to get picked up -- especially when you redirect a URL that's still the destination of an older redirect