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Hello all,

The company that develops our website recently contacted and asked me if we could remove a large amount of URL rewrites. I've described a few factors and my main questions below.

Some information:

• One year ago we did a large migration. We went from 27 websites to one main website.
• We have got about 2000 rewrites in the htaccess file. And the file is 208kb.
• A lot of links from our old domains still have incoming traffic which are handled by the rewrite rules mentioned above.

Questions:
The company that develops our website said that the htaccess file is too large and is causing or could be causing us website performance issues. They have asked us to remove URL rewrites.
My question is:
a) How many rewrites is too much? 
b) Is the filesize of the htaccess of any importance or is it just the amount of rewrites in the file?
c) Could we solve any potential server/website performance issues due to a large htaccess file in any other way? Increasing some values like 'post_max_size' or by any other solutions handled serverside?

I do not have a lot of knowledge of htaccess rules but I've seen websites that handled over a million of rewrite rules. This is why I'm having doubts on whether removing URL rewrites is the only solution and possibly not the best solution for us.

Hopefully you can help me any further and with the best way to proceed without losing traffic or causing 404 pages.

Thanks in advance!
Iordache Voicu

Hi,

I have the following problem: The spam analyses tool in MOZ gives me a few links with a spam score of 10 and 9. I want to remove those links and try to contact the webmaster before disavowing the links. I read about being careful with too much disavowing. Unfortunately removing the links isn't possible because three different reasons:

1. The page/subdomain of one referring website that should have a link to my website doesn't exist anmymore (compliance.ikkiesvoorverandering.nl/). The website http://ikkiesvoorverandering.nl does exist, but is almost empty and there is no possibility to contact the webmaster. What do you guys recommend to do in this situation? Any experience with this problem?
2. On another website (with again no contact option) there is a link who directs to a former website, which has a redirect to my current website. I have no Google search console on that old website anymore. Does that make it impossible to disavow the link? What are other option to remove this link?
3. The website that comes up in the spam analyses tool is pretty much empty (http://veensma.jouwbegin.nl/). How can I delete a link from an empty website? Any thoughts?

I hope someone can help me with this, Would be glad to here from you

Lars