Any harm in deleting old redirects?

[cmeinck]

Is there any harm in deleting redirects? Initially, these might make sense. I'm thinking that at some point, it might be a good thing to parse these out. For example, I don't need search engines bumping into a redirect from 2012.



Any suggestions on finding existing redirects? Any way to mass delete redirects?

 

[Jake Bunce]

There is no reason to delete old redirects. There is also no utility to do this. It could be achieved with manual queries though.

For example, I don't need search engines bumping into a redirect from 2012.

The search engine will get redirected to the real thread. No harm that I can see.

 

[AndyB]

On my forum I have changed the default to one hour expiring redirects. So after an hour the redirects automatically get deleted. Redirects can be confusing to users and I think it's best to remove them after an hour.

 

[CTXMedia]

These redirects are internal; intended to show human visitors where a thread has gone.

AFAIK the URL remains exactly the same (because it doesn't reference the forum ID) wherever it is in your forum structure, so removing these redirects shouldn't impact on search engines at all.

 

[cmeinck]

Looks like my management of threads of the years has caused a few instances of this: