Question about 301 redirects

[Tedel]

Hi there,

I'm redesigning my site fully, so I'm taking the chance to rename the files on my site as well. No brainer, I'm using 301 redirects.

My question is how long do I need to keep the 301 redirect sentences I the .htaccess file. Permanently? or just until I see search engines have updated from inf_file_0001 to keyword-rich-page-title?

Thanks for your answers. :rasta:

 

[legitPHP]

It would be to your advantage to keep them in place indefinitely. If you have links pointing to those pages from other sites, you will need to keep those 301's in place to retain the traffic.

 

[coffeebean]

Yep permanently. You want to continue transferring juice from inbound links that point to the old urls.

 

[Tedel]

OK, thanks guys.

 

[Tedel]

Follow up question, please:

After renaming all the files on the site, the .htaccess file will be around 56kb. Is this OK or is there any need to reduce it? (I was thinking about .gzip, but I don't know if it's possible).