How do I get rid of crawl errors?

[dealblogger]

I recently revamped all my category pages to make them Google friendly. I did a lot of keyword research and ended up deleting categories and renaming categories. Now Google Webmasters is showing a ton of 404 errors. How can I get rid of them? Do I have to remove the URL one by one with Google Webmasters? Is it something that won't hurt my rankings and will go away in time?

[MikeRoberts]

Sounds like you need to set up 301 redirects from your old URLs to the the new relevant ones.

[dealblogger]

How? I suppose I should have done that instead of deleting them.

[AWCthreads]

Some platforms have a built-in 301 tool and all you have to do is upload the xml file with the proper redirects like so:

/source-category.htm/target-category.htm

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

301 redirects is definitely the way to go. How to do it will depend on the platform in the system that you're using. For example, I'm using Linux servers with a cPanel platform and I'm able to set up a .htaccess file and put the redirects in that .htaccess file. I know Microsoft servers have a similar file, though I can't remember the .name of it.

So, depending on your system and on how much access you have to the servers and the server files, you may be able to set up something like about .ht access or you might have to set something up within your website itself. So, it's difficult to say without knowing what your actual system is, but you definitely want to be setting up 301 redirects for those URLs that are sending 404 errors.

[dealblogger]

I am using Wordpress. I am hoping there is a plugin that makes it easy to deal with this? Any recommendations?Can I just redirect some of them to the homepage? They don't all have a new, relevant category to redirect to.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

I haven't used a specific WP plugin which I could recommend, but I did a quick search and found the following which may work for you:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

As for whether it's alright to link some to your homepage, certainly.  My recommendation would be to redirect to the page that is closest in topic to what your old page was about.  If that's your homepage, that's fine.  If you have category page that is related, that's better.  If you have a page that is covering the exact same topic, that's best.  Just choose the best option available.

The other consideration is time.  If we're talking about thousands and thousands of redirects, then you may just be best off redirecting to your homepage and saving hours and hours of work.  Either that or outsourcing the work.

Good luck.  If you find a good plugin that does what you need, let us know what plugin you used.