Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?

[rriot]

I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page.

Something like:

if (this city page should be removed) {

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
 header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
 exit();
}

Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page?

Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway.

Thanks in advance!

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Daniel,
when setting up a 404 page you should have it directed to 404 never 200 and make sure there's nothing else occurring on that page for instance redirecting somebody somewhere else.
to answer your question directly I would eliminate the redirect.

I hope this is been of help,
Thomas

[rriot]

thanks, I've removed the redirects. I appreciate the advice!

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Daniel,

I am very happy I could be of help to you.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[BD69]

I'm dealing with a similar situation, thousands of low content city pages. There is almost 0 traffic or links to these pages, no human would ever navigate to them - in this case it would be best to just delete them? Do they need a 404? I'm not sure if Google is even indexing them.

[Everett]

Hello BarrelRoll42,

You should easily be able to find out if Google is indexing them by doing a site:yourdomain.com search on Google. But to answer your question, it sounds like you should probably delete them and let them 404. If Google HAS indexed them you may also need to use the URL Removal Tool in Google Webmaster Tools.

One last thing. Please do start a thread for your own question next time, as we try to keep it to one question per thread.

Thanks!