Do you ever retire old 301s, or keep them forever?

[Nemanja]

I have sites still carrying redirect rules from migrations that happened years ago, pointing away from URLs nobody has linked to since. Google's line has always been to keep a 301 in place for at least a year, and after that the consolidation has happened and the rule is mostly there for humans with old bookmarks.

The case for leaving them is that removing one turns a live path into a 404 and you cannot always see what still points at it. Old forum posts, a PDF someone circulated, a newsletter that still gets opened. The case for cleaning up is that these files only grow, chains form when a redirected URL later gets redirected again, and by year three nobody remembers why half the lines exist.

Where I have actually cleaned up, what I trusted was server logs rather than a link tool. If the old path was still getting real requests in the last few months it stayed, and if it had not been touched in a year it went.

Does anyone genuinely retire these, or is the honest answer that the file just keeps growing until a migration forces the issue?

 

[DirectHits]

I have retired very few and I have been a professional SEO since 2008. If there are links out there to the old page, there is link juice being directed to your site via the 301.

 

[spidersolitaire]

I’d probably keep the 301s if they still receive meaningful traffic or have known external links. Server logs are a much better signal than relying only on backlink tools, especially for old URLs that may still be used from bookmarks or offline documents. For completely dead URLs with no requests for a long period, I think retiring them is reasonable, as long as you’ve checked for redirect chains and important historical links first.