Should i redirect my lost links to my home page

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, as some of you maybe aware, i had a major problem last year that has caused me nothing but trouble. in short, my hosting company lost me over 10,000 pages from my site and i had to rebuild the site from stratch which is still on going. I lost thousands of links to my site and i have been over the past week pointing the pages not found to the sections that is best suited to them.

But i am just wondering if it would harm my site if i also point some of those links to my home page.

I was a page rank four before disaster happened to my site and now i am a page rank two and i want to build this up. so i am just wondering if i should point some of those good links to my home page

i am redirecting the pages using 301 in my htaccess file

any advice would be great

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Diane,

Have you checked out the post from Stephanie about what to do with expired content? she has suggestions about redirecting to the home page versus category pages that might be helpful. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for that kerry. yes i read that the other week after your suggestion and that is why i have been pointing the links to the right section.

But what i have been thinking of, because the home page is the latest news and articles, i am wondering if i should point some of the links to the home page to help me increase in page rank. as most of the links could be classed as relevant to the home page.

i have about 5,000 links to carry on with, so not sure if i should choose around 800 of these links and have them to the home page.

This is my problem, i have a lot of links coming from the same sources, so for example we get a great deal of traffic from huffington post, they comment on a lot of our articles and produce our articles on their site, so if i have 100 links from them coming from different pages on their site, would it be a good idea to have these pointing to my home page or just choose one link to go to the home page.

i would recommend people reading the article above as it produces great advice on what to do with the links

many thanks keri