Redirect duration and multiple level redirects

Hi,

A couple of questions from a newbie – hope you can help because I am stuck!

1) I have been using the redirection plugin for over a year to redirect root domain requests to a sub dir e.g. http://www.widget.com/page1 to http://www.widget.com/widget/page1

I assumed that redirects only need to be in place for a a few months max before search engines realise where the new site is? The logs in the plugin still seem to accumulate in their thousands telling me that the referrer e.g. google is still picking up traffic from http://www.widget.com/page1. Is this normal after all this time and when can I expect this to diminish?

2) After having redirected all my site pages as per the example above – I now need to 2 of the new pages on the site by creating a new page and redirect traffic from the old pages and new pages to this newer page. Would i just create
e.g.
http://www.widget.com/page1 to http://www.widget.com/widget/newer page
http://www.widget.com/page2 to http://www.widget.com/widget/newer page
http://www.widget.com/widget/page1 to http://www.widget.com/widget/newer page
http://www.widget.com/widget/page2 to http://www.widget.com/widget/newer page

Can the plugin deal with 3 tiers/levels of redirect?

Hope this makes sense