Rebranding: 404 to homepage?

[JohnPalmer]

Hi Luis!

Thanks for your answer!
Do you know plugin for this? (for the auto redirect 404 to the same page with another domain)?

and important question: If I did it already, I meant, all 404 redirect to Homepage. It's safety to replace it again?

[Yeeply.com]

Hello John,

Do you know plugin for this? (for the auto redirect 404 to the same page with another domain)?

==> May I know your domain name? Are you using wordpress? Sometimes you don't even need a plugin for this if you know how to code

and important question: If I did it already, I meant, all 404 redirect to Homepage. It's safety to replace it again?

==> YES, normally shouldn't impact your site

Luis

[JohnPalmer]

I have a Wordpress site you know plugin (RegEx)?

and what I'll do with all the errors in my WMT?

[Yeeply.com]

I don't know this plugin sorry!

Let's think about 2 scenarios to understand the situation here:

• If a site is having 1,000+ visitors/month watching a 404 error ==> the problem here is not the 404 landing page, but a bad domain URL redirect or something different to be analyzed.
• If a site is having 20 visitors/month watching a 404 error ==> there's no problem here, this happens to everyone and you should take care of them creating a 404 landing page to minimize the impact of a 404 error.

In what case you are now? I need more information in order to help you/giving you deeper advice.

Luis

[JohnPalmer]

I have a website with +3000 visitors per day, I don't know how many 404s I have in my old website because all of them redirect to my Homepage, I have no any idea how many.

Don't forget: I have a news websites with 20,000 pages (live). it's okay to keep the redirects as is? )(to homepage?)
all the 404s came from forums/comments from third party websites.

[Yeeply.com]

Well, in that case probably I'd keep it like that (I don't see any SEO/IT problem with a redirect to the homepage!)

It's just that I rather prefer the other solution in terms of UX.

Luis

[JohnPalmer]

If I understand you correct, you meant to keep it as is? 404 -> homepage?why? why you changed your decision?

[Yeeply.com]

Hello John,

Ok, a little misunderstanding here! Remember first of all that I'm only trying to help/advice you but I don't know your domain, your site and what you may have in mind hehe.

If you read my first answer, I said "the best option". Both options were good, but in my case, I prefer to put a 404 page instead of sending the users to the homepage (with no explanation). Again, this is only a little improvement in terms of UX but in terms of SEO both options work fine.

It's all I can say!

Luis

[MattRoney]

I have to agree here. I tend to believe that redirecting all 404s to the homepage isn't the best idea from a user experience perspective. If a user clicks on a link on your site expecting to find information on a particular topic and instead winds up on the homepage with no explanation, they're likely to get frustrated.

Honestly, your BEST bet is to 301-redirect all old URLs to their equivalent new pages. If there are no corresponding new pages, then I'd say redirecting to a 404 page is your best bet.

[JohnPalmer]

and it's safety to do that after a month? all my 404s redirect to my homepage currently.

and you know about plugin + regular expression for this?

[MattRoney]

I can't think of any reason it wouldn't be safe to alter those redirects after a month. You may want to resubmit your sitemap in Webmaster Tools to alert Google, but it should be totally safe.

I'm afraid I can't recommend a plugin or regular expression—those are both well outside my expertise. As an agency SEO, I placed 301s in .htaccess or had a dev do it for me.