How long should you leave 301's in place?

[brean78]

Hello people, this is just a quick question and hopefully it will have a fairly straightforward answer.

How long after putting 301 redirects in place should you leave them? Is it a case of checking google to see if the new page/url has been indexed?

The reason I want to take them out is they (301's) are slowing page loading times a bit, which is all part of the SEO mix.

Any insights would be gratefully welcomed

[davemerry]

This should be a fairly simple answer however I am slightly confused here, what do you mean they are slowing page loading times a bit?

They would only slow page loading times if users are still accessing the page that redirects, in which it wouldn't be a good idea to take the redirect out at all.

Could you give me a specific example to help further with? Feel free to PM if you don't want it on the main board.

[graham]

I leave them in permanently if there are links going to the old URL structure. May not be the best practice, but I wouldn't want to lose credit for older links. If the pages have no backlinks to the prior one, then I'd update Webmaster tools to the new URL (I think there is something where you can specify a page moved) then get rid of them after the new URL is indexed and the old URL is removed.

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

I agree with both posters - forever 301's should not be slowing down load time on your page, and google will eventually index and crawl the destination page and de-index the 301 page.

Unless you have 0 links or you personally know each and every webmaster that has a link to those pages and can get them to replace the link, you need to keep them in place as this passes all the attributes and link juice directly down through to the destination page.