Are 301 redirects long term?

I was thinking about 301 redirects and I've got a question for those who do use them, especially those who use lots of them.

How long do you keep a domain you're 301ing for? I was thinking about it and I'm guessing it goes into two situations

1. The Google link juice. If a domain is considered reputable you'll keep it for getting the Google Link juice but I'm guessing that this decreases over time as Google decides to rank the 301 target rather than the 301 source domain.
   
   
2. The traffic. If the domain gets a lot of traffic you'd expect to see this slowly decrease over time as more reputable links replace the old one (maybe more direct links to your main site rather than 301 source).
   

Both of it would decrease over time (though for large volumes of traffic it going down could still be considerable). Are there any other considerations you give to how long you keep the domain?

I'd also be intrigued to know how you track things like Google Link Juice and Traffic that the old domain is giving you? I guess you wouldn't be able to tell one the target domain.

Thanks for your thoughts all

Until it doesn't have any links left to 301 to your new domains.

As soon as you remove the 301 (or don't renew the domain), all the link are technically broken, and you lose all the link equity transfer.

(Note: All things being equal, older links are better than new links... however, you will see links depreciate as the years go on. It's natural the pages linking to you will lose links themselves or lose importance in a source sites hierarchy)

FostexKiller said:

however, you will see links depreciate as the years go on. It's natural the pages linking to you will lose links themselves or lose importance in a source sites hierarchy)

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Thanks.
Do you monitor the backlinks and importance (I'm guessing things like DA/PA) manually using tools like ahrefs?

Just get some niche relevant expired domains or some semi-premium domains with lots of editorial links from authority websites. That’s a lot cheaper than buying links.

jefis said:

Just get some niche relevant expired domains or some semi-premium domains with lots of editorial links from authority websites. That’s a lot cheaper than buying links.

Click to expand...

Completely agree, though not really talking about buying links. I'm intrigued on how people maintain their 301s and when they decide to not bother renewing them, if there's an approach people take etc. Also whether there are other metrics people follow to decide when to keep and when to get rid of their domains.

Satal said:

Thanks.
Do you monitor the backlinks and importance (I'm guessing things like DA/PA) manually using tools like ahrefs?

Click to expand...

Yeah, your 301 links will appear in your profile in those tools for the domain you're directing them to. You should constantly be building links anyway to grow and help with the depreciation of older links.

To be honest with you mate, for the energy, it costs like $10 to renew a domain.

If you have loads of them, just bulk check them every 6 months and turn off the auto-renew on the ones that have passed their sell-by-date.