301 Redirects in .htaccess, should you delete them eventually?

[apples]

I just checked my .htaccess file and I have just over 100 301 URL redirects.

Some of them are redirects when I physically moved pages around on the site. An example was say, www.site.com/widget gets moved to www.site.com/cheap-widgets/widget.html

Then I have 301's for when I check in google webmasters for broken links. An example of that might be when someone used an article of mine from an article directory and does not properly link back to my page. They will do something like this, www.site.com/widget.httm. Whether that is deliberate of what, the question remains.

But either way they are the two types of 301 redirects that I use on my site. I have just over 100 of them and I did read that they are not that good to have in terms of SEO.

So do you delete them after a while or what?

Peter

[UMS]

Where did you read they were bad for SEO?

Ask yourself a simple question, is a 404 page not found going to be better than a 301 redirect?

[apples]

yeah a 404 is just a dead end.

I read that it takes a long (longer) time for page rank juice to flow through a 301 compared to if it was not redirected.

And does having 100+ redirects in my .htaccess file slow my site load times down at all? On each page load, does the browser have to read through the whole .htaccess file?

[patey88]

If there are links out there on the internet that point to your old page locations, that somebody might click someday -- then you need to keep your 301s. You keep them forever, or until you stop caring whether anyone clicks a backlink and gets a 404.

Sure, there might be some lessening of link juice flowing to your page from those backlinks to the redirected page. But presumably your newer backlinks go directly to the new page. And you will get more and more of these new backlinks. Eventually the old ones will just be a fraction of all you have.

Browsers do not read through .htaccess files. The file is handled server-side. The browser sends a request for the old URL to the server, and the server checks .htaccess and sends the new page back instead. The server does this pretty quickly and (I'm not an expert) might even cache the file so it doesn't have to read it every time. It's not a big deal for a file your size.

Originally Posted by apples

yeah a 404 is just a dead end.

I read that it takes a long (longer) time for page rank juice to flow through a 301 compared to if it was not redirected.

And does having 100+ redirects in my .htaccess file slow my site load times down at all? On each page load, does the browser have to read through the whole .htaccess file?

[apples]

Okay, that will keep me happy. Thanks guys...