Is it ok to remove 301 redirects after a year? We tested it

In 2021, Google’s Gary Illyes said on Twitter that redirect signals permanently consolidate to the new location after one year.

This means that signals to the original URL are permanently transferred to the new one after a year.

If the redirect is removed and the original page is restored, the original page must build brand new signals on its own.

Even though the old links still point to the original page, they count towards the page that has been the redirect target for more than a year.

This is different from what SEOs believe. It is usually assumed that if the redirection is no longer in place, the signals are lost. It is also understood that if the original page is restored, the signals for that page will build up. Have we been wrong this whole time? Let’s find out.

I removed redirects to these pages on January 30, 2023:

These posts were chosen because older posts redirected to them. Those older posts were on the same topics and had enough links and referring domains that I thought removing them would have a visible impact.

You can see the clear drop in referring domains after I did this:

What I don’t see is much of a drop in traffic to these posts. One actually has more traffic, one is down, and two are relatively flat.

The post about keyword search volume is the one that was down. The drop that appears to have occurred around the same time as when the redirects were removed actually occurred a few days before the removal. You can see that the drop already happened on January 24th, but I didn’t remove redirects until January 30th.

Traffic to the post did decrease during testing, so I can’t rule out that removing the redirects hurt this post.

I’m not prepared to say conclusively that permanent forwarding value succeeds even after one year, but what Gary said seems to be mostly true.

It’s not that I don’t believe Gary, but it’s radically different from how SEOs thought redirects were consolidated. It seems crazy that signals can be consolidated to a different location than where a link is pointing.

This is certainly not something I want to take lightly. I’m already working on another test, have a bigger test planned if it comes out, and will probably do a study after that. While this is not conclusive, it is likely to be true, which is why I want to share it now.

If the way we understand redirect consolidation is wrong, it has massive implications for the SEO industry.

Redirect recommendations

One of the tactics I always use with a new client is to redirect 404 pages that have links pointing to them. I think in most of those cases the pages were never redirected.

If redirects are actually permanent after one year, I would need to segment those that were redirected for more than a year from those that weren’t. There can still be value with this tactic, but with less work required.

Buy domain

This is a big one. The value of a domain can change a lot based on the links pointing to it.

Many SEOs buy domains that already have links from sites in the same niche when they plan to launch a new site or redirect it to their current site. They hope that these old links will help them rank better.

Imagine if that value was no longer truly there. If the domain has been redirected for a year or more and the value has been permanently transferred to another domain, that domain may be worth much less.

Tools

There is also a big impact on various tools like Ahrefs if the redirects pass permanent value. We will need to change how we point links and domains to these sites when redirects are involved.

I’m sure we’ll also get a lot of questions when the redirects are removed, e.g. “Why are you still pointing these links to this page when the other page no longer redirects?” It’s a strange concept, right? But if that’s how it works, that’s what we have to do.

Final thoughts

I haven’t seen any change in the SEO industry or the recommendations of SEOs since Gary’s tweet. I’m not sure if it’s because few people have seen it or followed the broken conversation, or if we collectively don’t want to believe that redirects consolidate differently than we think.

I still don’t think many SEOs believe me when I say temporary redirects consolidate back to the original URL, but they do.

Like I said, I’m not ready to call this one yet. At the very least, much more testing needs to be done before I’m willing to conclude that permanent redirects do indeed permanently pass signals.

If you have any questions, message me on Twitter.