Is it ok to remove 301 redirects after a year? We tested it

In 2021, Google’s Gary Illyes said on Twitter that redirect signals permanently consolidate to the new location after one year.

This means that signals to the original URL are permanently transferred to the new one after a year.

If the redirect is removed and the original page is restored, the original page must build brand new signals on its own.

Even though the old links still point to the original page, they count towards the page that has been the redirect target for more than a year.

This is different from what SEOs believe. It is usually assumed that if the redirection is no longer in place, the signals are lost. It is also understood that if the original page is restored, the signals for that page will build up. Have we been wrong this whole time? Let’s find out.

I removed redirects to these pages on January 30, 2023:

These posts were chosen because older posts redirected to them. Those older posts were on the same topics and had enough links and referring domains that I thought removing them would have a visible impact.

You can see the clear drop in referring domains after I did this:

What I don’t see is much of a drop in traffic to these posts. One actually has more traffic, one is down, and two are relatively flat.

The post about keyword search volume is the one that was down. The drop that appears to have occurred around the same time as when the redirects were removed actually...