1,300,000 404s

[Runner2009]

Just moved a WordProcess site over to a new host and skinned it. Found out after the fact that the site had been hacked - the db is clean.

I did notice at first there were a lot of 404s being generated, so I setup a script to capture and then return a 410 page gone - and then the plan was to submit them to have them removed from the index - thinking there was a manageable number

But, when I looked at Google WebMaster Tools there was over 1,300,000 404 errors  - see attachment. My puny attempt to solve this problem seems to need more of an industrial size solution.

My question, is that what would be the best way to deal with this? Not all of the pages are indexed in google - only 637 index but you can only see about 150 in the index. Where bing is another story saying that over 2,700 pages index but only can see about 200.

How is this affecting any future rankings - they do not rank well, as I found out because of very slow page load speed and of course the hacks?

The link profile looking at Google is OK, and there are no messages in Google Webmaster tools.

am5cMz2

[Runner2009]

According to Google's John Muller

"404 errors on invalid URLs do not harm your site’s indexing or ranking in any way. It doesn’t matter if there are 100 or 10 million, they won’t harm your site’s ranking"

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Agree with that, one of our sites has 10 million 404 errors as we deal with a lot of changing content over tens of millions of pages. It doesn't look an increase in 404 errors caused any trouble.