What is the longest you would go back to ressurrect links that should have been 301's?

[AshWilliams]

I've been in a similar situation. My recommendation is to look in Google Webmaster Tools in 'Crawl > Crawl Errors' and if it is reporting them as 404 pages, what's the harm in redirecting them?

Google can crawl old URLs which 404 or provide another error for years (as in my case - it was an old website redesign from A LONG time ago).

[Andy.Drinkwater]

What? You callin me a fruit picker???

There are worse things

[GPainter]

Really hope that they had a custom 404 page at least!

[Linda-Vassily]

When I first started my current job, I found out that in the past there had been a separate, small website for one of the products, which had been abandoned a couple of years before that. (The site, not the product.)

The site still seemed to have some good links pointing to it, so for the heck of it I 301'd it to the main page on the current site for that product. That page quickly grew to be one of the strongest pages on the current site.

This is just one anecdotal data point but based on my experience if it's not a huge amount of work, I'd try redirecting, at least for the pages with the best links.

[EGOL]

Great story.

That reminds me of one...  I know of a small adsense site that went offline and the owner didn't realize.   A few months went by before they realized that the hosting was not responding.   The site was brought back online, popped back into the SERPs and resumed making money.

[RobertFisher]

Tom,

Great points. I am not as concerned with content relevance as we are fairly careful with that. The issue was it was a new site but used old content and they did not do redirects. I am going to give it a try with what I find to be the most relevant pages from the old, but not with all as I do not want to "overdo" it.

Thanks

[RobertFisher]

Very good point Ash, very good. I have seen it continue to crawl for a year or more as well. Checking for the 404s as a comparison and redirecting to fix the 404's is a good explanation. Well done.

[RobertFisher]

LInda,

I think the point about it being anecdotal really is what I was looking for. There is no clear direction from the search engines on this so that is one of the things that makes Moz so strong. Good SEO's sharing anecdotal and other evidence/ideas. 
Thanks so much,

Robert

[RobertFisher]

Think about it... They did a poor UI/UX site, none or few redirects from a fairly well ranked and high DA/PA site... do you really think they would even consider a custom 404 page? I think we spend more time trying to explain to clients that not everyone gets good design, SEO, etc. No matter what the name of their company says. 
Best

[GPainter]

...a man can dream,....

My favorite is taking the time to explain followed by silence...not awkward at all!

[Guest]

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[Guest]

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[Linda-Vassily]

The link in this reply is to a website about "cheap goalkeeper gloves"

[Linda-Vassily]

This link is about using a compass