Easiest Way to redirect 50 404s spread out randomly over 9400 pages

[BobGW]

Hello,

I've got about 50 404s I'm hunting down and redirecting (to the home page) on a client's site. There are no on-site links pointing towards most of them, they're just out there floating and indexed by google. I should be more specific - these URLs just pull up as a blank white page with nothing on it.

I'm concerned that Google has these indexed and it is causing a problem. They're all Ecommerce category pages where the URL has been changed.

site:domain.com is showing 9400 pages.

Moz analytics is showing 4 404s

Is there any faster way to track down all 50 404s than to manually go through the 9400 URLs in the SERPs after I type in site:domain.com?

Thank you.

[MikeRoberts]

Are they listed in Google Webmaster tools? You should be able to find out where they are linking from that way. Also, if they're 404ing and they weren't ever a real page and they aren't really being linked from anywhere then there's no real reason to stop it from 404ing. You should probably make a custom 404 to serve people that directs them back to your site instead of a completely blank page.

[BobGW]

GWT shows no crawl errors in the last 90 days.

But if I go to site:domain.com some of the first 20 listings go to blank white pages.

I said 404s but I just meant blank white pages.

So you'll have

www.domain.com/categorytype1     goes to a blank white page

www.domain.com/new-url-for-categorytype1      goes to a category page

Do I need to worry about these blank white pages, or will Google figure out what they are? I've created about 50 of them (by accident) but maybe Google has quickly sorted out and de-indexed the blank white pages.

Your thoughts?

[farbeseo]

It sounds like blank white pages may mean your system has a misconfiguration that's causing these pages to display blanks. It could be something as simple as an illegal character you put in a page title or a more general config problem you have on your category pages. What ecom system are you using if you don't mind me asking?

[BobGW]

What happened was I was using a URL rename textbox in the back end of our ecommerce platform. For the past year I have been renaming the URLs to fit keywords, sometimes renaming them a second time when the page drastically changed.

I figured the cart was doing a 301 redirect every time I renamed the URL, but instead of doing that, it did a 301 redirect the first time, then each additional time I renamed the URL, it just left a blank white page on the old URL.

Do I need to fix these blank white pages, or are they being filtered out by Google and won't harm the site's rankings?

I don't know if a custom 404 page - I could do that - is a good idea since they were once category pages. A custom 404 would be a good idea but I'm wondering if I have to do more.