When is it safe to take down our 301 redirects?

• My partner and I are having a heated "discussion" about how long to keep our 301 redirects in place after moving our site to a different URL.

  He's saying that 6 months is plenty of time. But I'm saying we should keep the 301 redirects in place for longer — but I'm not sure how long is long enough.

  Can you shed some light on this subject and settle this dispute between us once and for all?

Answer:

At least a year!

This may be one of the questions we get most, by the way, and the answer we give is consistently the same.

You must keep your 301 redirects in place for at least one year.

As we've said here, and as Google's John Mueller recently confirmed...

More for the next time (you can't really fix that now), I would recommend keeping the old domain name for longer, and definitely keeping the redirects in place for at least a year. 3 months is too short for a site-move.

— John (@JohnMu) March 18, 2022

... "at least a year" — everything else is far too short of a time to be sure that Google will continue passing ranking signals from the original pages to those on your new URL.

And, if you can keep them in place indefinitely, that's even better!

To learn more about 301 redirects take a look at these past, in-depth articles which are chock full of information that is still relevant today.

• How to Use a 301 Redir...