By using a 301 you can easily redirect visitors including search engine spiders like googlebot from an old page to a new page on your website. But how long does this redirection instruction need to remain in your .htaccess file or in your page header? Well, unfortunately in most cases a long, long time!

Actually, it does depend. If it’s a new webpage that you just created recently and one that hardly has any backlinks then it’s probably okay to remove the redirection after three months or so, maybe less.

But if it’s a page that’s been around for a while, been heavily indexed and linked from by many different sites and pages across the internet, then you’re going to want to leave that redirection up and running for a lot longer, almost forever!

And that’s because while the search engines will quickly figure out that the page has moved, sites linking back to that page won’t get the same redirection message, that is unless you tell each and every one them. And even then some webmasters still won’t update their link to a new one.

So if you’ve got an aged page with a lot of backlinks, your best bet is to leave the redirect up for the eternity of that page otherwise you run the risk of missing out traffic from those old links.

If you are worried that your .htaccess file is getting to large, you may want to look into dynamically setting the redirect with wildcards, etc. But regardless, the size of your .htaccess file shouldn’t pose a major problem.