301 redirecting landing page errors

[9Studios]

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[philipbuuck]

Did those pages exist in a former version of the site? If there's any way you can get the links to these dead pages identified and changed, that would be best. Otherwise yes, a 301 would be a somewhat hacky way to fix it. Wordpress has a plugin called Link Juice Keeper that essentially forwards any nonexistent link to the main page, which saves juice but never lets a reader see a 404 page. That's an extreme version of what you're talking about.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Chris,

Since the 404's don't appear to originate from the landing site you mentioned (I ran a quick check), there obviously are (or have been) links out there that point to those URL's. They could be links from another site, URL's that have been indexed in search engines or even old browser bookmarks.

Since you have no way of knowing where they might all come from, the 301 Redirect is the only complete solution. Philip is correct in suggesting that getting the links fixed at the source would be the ideal, but on its own this would still leave open the possibility of traffic coming from other sources.

Since the 301 Redirect serves the dual purpose of preserving the traffic AND sending a signal to the Search engines to deindex the old URL and replace it with the new target URL, source is eliminated as a factor.

Hope that helps,

Sha