You moved a page, changed a domain or rebuilt a site, and you set up 301 redirects. Months later, someone asks whether those old rules can be cleaned up.
It’s a fair question. Redirect lists grow, old domains cost money to renew, and nobody likes maintaining rules for pages that disappeared years ago.
The short answer from Google is “at least a year”. The longer answer depends on who is still using the old URLs, and that’s rarely only Google.
What Google actually recommends
Google’s guidance for site moves with URL changes is to keep redirects in place for as long as possible, and generally for at least one year. That gives Google time to recrawl the old URLs, see the redirects and move signals like links over to the new addresses.
The same page adds a line that’s easy to miss: from your users’ point of view, you should consider keeping redirects indefinitely.
So the one-year mark is a minimum for search engines, not an expiry date.
Why one year is the minimum, not the finish line
A 301 redirect tells Google that the new URL should be treated as the canonical one. Google’s redirects documentation also notes that it may keep showing old URLs in results for a while after a move, even when the new ones are already indexed.
Within a year, most of that settles. But search engines are only one source of traffic to an old URL. The others don’t follow Google’s schedule.
Who still uses your old URLs after a year
Old addresses live in far more places than your sitemap. After a year, these are usually still out there:
Backlinks: articles, directories and partner sites that linked to you rarely update their links. Remove the redirect and those links point at an error page.
Bookmarks and browser history: regular visitors type or click what they saved years ago.
Emails and newsletters: every campaign you ever sent still contains the old links.
Printed material: business cards, packaging, brochures and QR codes can’t be edited after printing.
Documents and PDFs: proposals, invoices and help docs shared outside your site.
Social posts: old posts and profile links keep getting clicks long after they were published.
This is why a redirect that looks “unused” in a sitemap can still be someone’s only way back to you. When links stop working over time, it’s called link rot, and removing redirects early is one of its most common causes.
What happens when you remove a redirect too early
Visitors who follow an old link land on a 404 instead of the page they wanted. Most won’t search for the new address; they just leave.
For SEO, the old URL stops passing anything to the new one. If good backlinks still point at the old address, removing the redirect throws that value away.
For a domain change, it can be worse. If the old domain itself stops redirecting, every link to it breaks at once. We covered that case in what to do with your old domain after a rebrand.
When it’s reasonably safe to remove a redirect
Some redirects can go. Before removing one, check that:
At least a year has passed since the change, so Google has had time to process it.
Google shows the new URLs. In Search Console, the old URLs should no longer appear in results. Our guide on using Search Console after changing domains shows where to look.
The old URL gets little or no traffic. If your redirect analytics still show visits, real people still use it.
No important backlinks point to it. Check your backlink tool for links to the old address.
It isn’t printed anywhere. If it’s on packaging or a QR code, keep it.
If a redirect passes all five, removing it is low risk. If it fails even one, keeping it usually costs less than losing the visitors.
Domains vs individual pages
It helps to separate two kinds of redirects.
Page-level redirects like example.com/old-page → example.com/new-page can often be retired after a few years if they get no traffic.
Domain redirects like oldbrand.com → newbrand.com are different. As long as you own the old domain, it’s worth keeping it redirecting. Letting it lapse also means someone else can register it and use your old links. We wrote more about this in should you redirect your old brand name forever.
How Redirect Supply handles long-term redirects
Keeping redirects for years is easier when they don’t depend on your website. In Redirect Supply, redirects run on Cloudflare’s edge network, so they keep working even if the old site is gone, and SSL certificates are issued and renewed automatically for every connected domain.
Built-in analytics help you see whether old URLs still get visits before you decide to remove anything. For a single old domain, the free plan includes one domain with a catch-all rule, free forever.
Before and after any cleanup, run the old URLs through the redirect tester to confirm each one returns a 301 and lands on the right page.
The practical rule
Keep redirects for at least a year for Google, and for as long as people still use the old links. When in doubt, a redirect you keep costs almost nothing; a link you break can’t be fixed after someone has already left.
