Can we remove old website after 301 redirect to new website is in place?

[Ozzman]

If we redirect permanently (using 301) from an old website to a new wesbite. In this case can we remove the old website? Will the redirected URLs from old to new website will still work or not? Or is it necessary to keep the old website in in place always?

Let me make it simple by the following example.

If I used this URL www.aabbcc.com for 4 years and all my incoming links are linked to it. Now I changed my URL to www.ccddeeff.com. I applied 301 redirect from www.aabbcc.com to www.ccddeeff.com. Currently, this scenario is working fine But what If I remove this page (or module) www.aabbcc.com permanently. Will the traffic still be redirected from www.aabbcc.com to www.ccddeeff.com? Or do i need to keep www.aabbcc.com for always?

[crankydave]

Once all the SE's have the 301 sorted out and are indexing and ranking only the new pages you can go ahead and remove the old site.

As long as there are actual pages from the old site that can be "found" it's a good idea to leave those pages in place if you don't want to lose potential traffic.

Keep the 301 in place to redirect everything that is external.

Dave

ETA... I probably should have qualified this a little better. If you are doing a single redirect site to site there's really no reason you "need" to leave the pages in place. If you are doing page to page redirects (ie new folders same domain) I like to leave the old pages in place to help make sure there aren't any I missed.

[activeco]

Originally Posted by Ozzman

If we redirect permanently (using 301) from an old website to a new wesbite. In this case can we remove the old website? Will the redirected URLs from old to new website will still work or not?

How could redirects work if there is no more old domain (that's what you refer to)? There is a simple, 'one for all' dns solution for that, but you will still have to keep the domain.
If there are important links still pointing to your old site, you should keep it. You can however ask webmasters of linking sites to change their links to new urls and only when there is nothing more important left on the web, you can remove the old one completely..

[1stgirl.com]

"Once all the SE's have the 301 sorted out and are indexing and ranking only the new pages you can go ahead and remove the old site." crankydave

I'm wondering how long since Google is a bit slow in indexing webpages.

[redspace]

ya agree if the search engine have redirect all the pages than you can safely take out the site. I think 301 redirect means the search engine permanently assign this and forever ever. but you need to make sure all the existing url old site has been crawled for the redirection. so it could take some time for the search engine to complete this.

[tmaster]

Some indexes will never update your old links. I suggest you keep something on your old domain name. If you have it in the index you can create loading pages with seperate content from your main site. This will give you more incomming links.