The rebrand is finished. The new website is live, customers are getting used to the new name, and the old brand is slowly disappearing from view.
So how long should you keep redirecting the old domain?
A year? Five years? Forever?
There isn’t one expiration date that works for every rebrand. Google recommends keeping redirects after a site move for at least a year, but that doesn’t mean you should automatically remove them when those twelve months are up.
If people are still using your old brand name, the redirects are still doing useful work.
Your old brand doesn’t disappear on launch day
You can replace a logo overnight. You can’t replace every mention of your old brand quite as quickly.
The old name might still appear in articles, directories, social posts, emails, presentations, PDFs, bookmarks, or links from other websites. Some customers may even keep searching for it simply because that’s the name they remember.
Imagine you rebrand from Old Brand to New Brand and move from:
oldbrand.com
to:
newbrand.com
A year later, someone finds a three-year-old article linking to oldbrand.com/services.
That link hasn’t stopped being useful just because your rebrand is no longer new.
If the old domain still redirects, the visitor reaches your current website. If it doesn’t, you’ve turned a perfectly useful route to your business into a dead end.
The first year matters, but it isn’t necessarily the finish line
For a domain migration, permanent redirects help search engines understand that old URLs have moved to new locations.
Google recommends keeping those redirects in place for at least one year. That gives Google time to revisit old URLs and transfer its signals to the new ones.
But SEO isn’t the only reason redirects exist.
After that first year, backlinks can still point to the old domain. Customers can still have pages bookmarked. Old documents can still be circulating. Someone can still type the old brand name into their browser.
Removing the redirects because an arbitrary amount of time has passed ignores all of those visitors.
A better question is whether the old domain is still being used.
Check whether the old domain is still valuable
Before switching anything off, look at what the old domain is still doing for you.
You’ll want to know:
Does the old domain still receive visits?
Are valuable backlinks still pointing to it?
Are people still searching for the old brand name?
Do old marketing materials, emails, documents, or profiles still use it?
Would someone reasonably expect the old brand to lead to your current business?
If the answer to several of those questions is yes, there’s a good argument for keeping the redirects.
The domain renewal cost may be tiny compared with the traffic, backlinks, and brand recognition it continues to preserve.
Keep the domain, not the old website
Keeping redirects alive doesn’t mean keeping your old website online forever.
That distinction makes the decision much easier.
You can retire the old design, cancel unnecessary hosting, and remove the old website entirely while continuing to own the domain and redirect its URLs.
For example:
oldbrand.com → newbrand.com
oldbrand.com/pricing → newbrand.com/pricing
oldbrand.com/contact → newbrand.com/contact
The old brand no longer needs a functioning website. It only needs infrastructure capable of receiving requests and returning the right redirects.
This is exactly the kind of situation where separating redirects from hosting becomes useful.
Don’t reduce everything to one homepage redirect
As the rebrand gets older, you might be tempted to simplify the setup.
Why maintain dozens of old URL redirects when you could just send the whole domain to the new homepage?
For some old domains, a simple domain-wide redirect may eventually be enough. But if important backlinks still point to specific pages, keeping relevant page-level redirects can provide a much better experience.
Someone following:
oldbrand.com/research/report
probably clicked it because they wanted that report.
If the content still exists at:
newbrand.com/resources/report
send them there.
If it no longer exists and there’s no meaningful replacement, you don’t have to invent one.
The same rule applies years after a rebrand as it did on launch day: redirect people somewhere useful.
What happens if you let the old domain expire?
This is the part that makes “forever” worth considering.
Once you stop renewing the old domain, you lose control of it.
Your redirects stop working, but that isn’t necessarily the end of the story. Depending on the domain and its registration lifecycle, someone else may eventually be able to register it.
That person would then control a domain that may still have backlinks, bookmarks, search history, and recognition associated with your former brand.
For a domain with a meaningful history, keeping it registered can therefore be about more than SEO. It can also be a sensible way to protect old routes to your brand.
You don’t need to keep every forgotten domain you’ve ever owned. But giving up an established former brand domain deserves more thought than simply noticing that the rebrand happened a few years ago.
So, should you keep the redirects forever?
Sometimes, yes.
If the old domain is inexpensive to maintain, still receives traffic, has valuable backlinks, or remains closely associated with your company, there may be very little reason to stop redirecting it.
“Forever” doesn’t have to mean making a decision today that can never be changed. It can simply mean there’s no predetermined date when the redirects must disappear.
Keep them while they continue to serve a purpose. Review the domain occasionally. If years later it has no meaningful traffic, links, brand recognition, or other value, you can reconsider.
Redirect Supply lets you keep those redirects running without keeping the old website or hosting alive. The old domain can continue doing its one remaining job: getting people from the brand they remember to the brand you use today.
Your rebrand may be finished.
That doesn’t mean your old brand has stopped sending people your way.
