Google will pass permanent signals with a redirect after a year

[siteadmin]

If you have a redirect live for a year, you can then remove the redirect and Google will continue to pass the signals from the origin URL to the destination URL.

We know Google has told us to leave our redirects up for at least a year, but now, Gary Illyes from Google said the “concrete answer” after he dug into how Google Search handles it internally, is to leave your redirect up for “at least one year.” This will result in Google to pass any signals from the origin URL to the destination URL from the time Google found the redirect, to the time Google noticed the redirect was removed.

That means, the signals passed from the origin URL to the destination URL will always be associated with the destination URL, even after you remove the redirect. But after you do remove the redirect, the signals going forward will then be associated with the origin URL and not the destination URL.

What about signals passing? So Gary Illyes and a bunch of SEOs went back and forth to try and clarify what that means. I summarized it above but here is Patrick Stox, a longtime SEO, summing up Gary Illyes' clarification:

More caveats. Technically it may take less than a year, but to be sure keep it for a year to be sure the signals will stick with the destination url.

Also for users, you probably want to keep the redirect for as long as possible. It's up to you.

One final point, which I mentioned above, is that the countdown begins when Google finds out about the redirect for the first time. So if you follow it closely, it's based on what time Google crawled the redirect, not when you actually set up the redirect.

Why we care. This is the first time that Google has officially confirmed that the signals transmitted by redirects last indefinitely even after moving a redirect, if the redirect has been active for more than a year.

So now if you have customers who really want to remove redirects for whatever reason, if the redirect has been active for a year or more, you can safely do so from a specific SEO perspective. Google search.

More importantly, if the redirect gets deleted over time due to normal maintenance and it's been a year, you still don't have to worry.