Does it matter? 404 v.s. 302 > Page Not Found

[rpaiva]

Hey Mozers,

What are your thoughts of this situation i'm stuck in all inputs welcome

I am in the middle of this massive domain migration to a new server.  Also we are going to be having a very clean SEO friendly url structure.  While I was doing some parsing and cleaning up some old urls I stumbled upon a strange situation on my website.

I have a bunch of "dead pages" and they are 302'd to a "page not found" probably a old mistake of one of the past developers.  (To clarify the HTTP Status code is not 404)

Should I try to fight to get all these "dead pages" a 404 error code or could I just leave the temp redirect 302 > "page not found" ( even though I know for a fact theses pages are not going to turn on again)

[RyanPurkey]

It sounds like they're 302'ing to a 200 instead of a 404 to a page that says, "page not found"... In that case, you should get them to be legitimate 404s or 410s.  A custom 404 page would be a nice touch as well to help clean up the navigation.

By the time you migrate (via 301) you could point these to the most applicable section of your new site where they should have pointed on the old site and be pretty much done with your clean up.

[David-Kley]

Depending upon how many you have (you said "a bunch"), there are multiple ways of fixing this.

If you are using a CMS, you can install a universal 404 handler, which will either direct a 404 page to the top level menu item of that group, or to the home page. If using a asp or html, I'm sure a decent developer could code one up for you.

If the dead pages are ranked (indexed) pages, I would make sure they forward to the new page that exists on your new server.

[rpaiva]

Looks like my stystem is set up to 301 to a 404.  Which do you think Google with honor? (the 301 or the 404)

Also wouldn't having a 301 to a 404 keep bots crawling our server because its a redirect instead of the server providing a 404 or 410

[RyanPurkey]

Ya, that's a mess. Either 301 to a live page or let the 404 be delivered on its own.