Background

When a website moves, changes domains/URLs, or shuts down, a redirect is often a good idea to help maintain functionality of existing links and preserve search engine optimization. Ideally, these redirects would exist forever. However, that's not incredibly practical, as each request to the web server needs to evaluate all of the possible redirection rules. (Note that a single request to a web page may involve > 100 individual requests.) As such, maintaining too many redirects for too long begins to slow down web requests and becomes a burden to maintain.

Additionally, there is a financial cost associated with maintaining redirects indefinitely.

Redirect Retention Standards

The following are general standards used in the determination of redirect retention periods.

Organizational Domain Change (e.g. switching from ces.uwex.edu to extension.wisc.edu): 5 years

Statewide Program Change (e.g. an official Program switching from programname.extension.wisc.edu to institutename.extension.wisc.edu/programs/programname): 3 years

Everything Else: 1 year

Note that this doesn't mean that redirects will immediately be cleared after the end of the retention period, as redirects are only evaluated and removed periodically.

Website Lifecycle

Redirects may exist separately from the website materials continuing to exist on the web server. The website materials may be cleared from the web server while the redirect is still in place. This is to reduce the use of server resources, reduce storage costs, and prevent media files (such as documents and images) from being visited, indexed, or scraped.

A website that has been offline, redirecting, or otherwise unavailable beyond the relevant redirect retention standards will be permanently deleted.