600+ 404 Errors: Best Practice for Redirects?

[G2W]

Hi All,

I've just checked my GWMT profile for one of my client's sites and found that there are currently over 600 404 Error notifications! This is not that surprising given that we very recently redesigned and launched their new corporate site, which previously had a ton of "junk" legacy pages.

I was wondering if it would work in terms of efficient SEO to simply apply a 301 redirect from the 404 page to our root to solve this issue?

If not what would be a good solution?

Thanks in advance for all your great advice!

[generalzod]

Did your re-design include deleting these pages? If so, then just create a new sitemap.xml and submit it to GWMT then mark it as fixed. They usually stop searching for the missing page pretty quickly...

[TakeshiYoung]

Generally you should try to 301 redirect to pages that have the same or similar content to what was on there before. Try creating a list of all the 404 errors, and the sites that are linking to them. Then, you can prioritize the list based on the pagerank/page authority of the pages that are linking to those missing pages.

[yeagerd]

Want to save hours and hours of mindless repetitive coding?

Assuming you are on an Apache Linux server you will have a .htaccess file and this is where you will want to put your redirects.

I noticed in the comments one suggestion to just post a new sitemap and forget them as Google will too and this is true.  So first you need to answer one question.  Does any of the 600 have SEO Juice?

For those that are no, just forget them.  It does not hurt SEO to have 404 except for the page that actually has the 404.

If you say they have PR and SEO value then the last thing you will want to do is let them just die off.  You will want, as Mr. Young Suggested, setup a list to prioritize your links.  The SEOmoz csv file is great and then filter out the not needed entries.

So you have your list and chances are that several will go to the same page and then you need to format the rewrite which is:

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^old.htm$ http://www.new.com/ [R=301,L]

with the "  RewriteRule ^old.htm$ http://www.new.com/ [R=301,L]  being the part you rewrite for each 404 page.

As a easy fast and much better option, you can use the mass rewrite generator that you find at http://seo-website-designer.com/HtAccess-301-Redirect-Generator which will speed up your efforts a ton.  Hope that helps.

[G2W]

Thanks, Takeshi.

As it turned out, most of the 404s would not have been passing very much juice anyway. We did decide to go ahead and hedge our bets by simply redirecting the majority of them to the root anyway and marked them as fixed in GWMT.