301s Creating Soft 404s in GWT

[94501]

Hi,

We re-did a section of a site and got rid of hundreds of pages of no longer relevant content. We 301'd the urls to the category homepage. Now, GWT calls these soft 404s.

a) Should we have done something differently instead of 301ing?

b) Are these hundreds of soft 404 errors a big problem or threat to how Google sees us for SEO?

c) Should we correct this in some way?

Thanks... Darcy

[Ties.com]

Can you provide a few example URL's of this error.  I will take a closer look and give you a better response.