New Site Launch - Redirecting Hundreds of Old Invalid URLs?

[VTDesignWorks]

We have a client whose WMT shows a ton of "Not found" crawl errors after a new site launched. The URLs are largely a bunch of files that they had previously uploaded on their old site which have external links pointing at them.

What is their best course of action, if they don't have files on the new site that correspond with these old files? Redirect to the home page? Leave them 404ing? Customize 404 message?

(Note: They're mostly generic, non-human friendly URLs that are difficult to identify like /gallery3.php/ppage/3, g/interior.php/pid/3/sid/24,  /uploads/1213196781.pdf)

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

If these files are no longer relevant and have no where to go on the new site - make sure these files and pages have a custom 404.

Here are some suggestions on what to put on your custom 404.

You can also list these pages in your robots.txt file.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you need anything else - good luck!

[DirkC]

If the external links to these pages are ok in terms of quality, and you don't have a similar page on the new site, I would redirect these pages to the homepage. It would be a bit of a waste to loose good links to your site.

For the ones that have no (quality) incoming links - you could put a 404 (or in your case probably better a 410 - The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent) - see also this video of Matt Cutts on this topic. As Patrick indicates - a custom version is more user friendly compared to a standard one.

rgds,

Dirk

[VTDesignWorks]

Thanks for the suggestions Patrick.

[VTDesignWorks]

Thanks Dirk, this is the direction we were leaning.