hi guys, about to launch my site after a total rebuild. lots of pages im about to get rid of and others are moving to different pages. with 301's how long do i need to keep them in the .htaccess? is it just until google/yahoo etc have read it once? do they remember?or do i keep them there for good?
The longer the better. If you are certain that you have moved all links going to the old urls then you can remove them their. This might be a difficult task if there are alot of third party websites linking to those pages. You will need to inform them. If you don't care about those links then you don't need to worry about them.
doesn't Google's spiders look at a directory 3 or so times in a given period of time, then clears the link from the engine's database if no page is returned?