Redirecting Several Hundred Pages

[k9byron]

As of May 21st 2013 (Penguin 2.0 update) we hit a triple-header and I think we can now officially dubbed the "KING OF GOOGLE PANALTIES"!

-July 2012 - recieved 2 "Unatural Links" email

-April 2012 - 20% traffic hit

-May 21st 2013 - 35% traffic hit

We have/had lots of very low quality links using the same anchor text as well as about 150 very low quality articles and almost 100 categories w/several hundred products that recieved little to no traffic.

We have spent the last several weeks cleaning up our link profile and were highly successful in getting most of them removed and have kept detailed reports for our Reconsideration Request for the manual "Unatural Links" penalty. We have also went a step further and have completely redesigned the site that is now much faster/better on-page seo with new, high quality articles and are removing all the low quality articles, categories and products but we are unclear what to do with these.

Which brings me to my question. Should we redirect these pages back to the home page or just let them go to 404 error? I have been doing lots of reading on this subject but there doesnt seem to be any good answers. From what I read, neither are good choices and I cannot decide between the lesser of the 2 evil's ..so any help with this would be greatly apreciated!

Note:
-These category and product pages have absolutly no inbound links (link benefit) and in my opinion are only sucking off link juice and generating little to no revenue. There are also no similar categories or products that these could be redirected to. For example, redirecting dog toys to the dog bed category just sounds like it would increase our bounce rate.

-Again, the articles also have no link benefit and only a small handful of the articles actually generate any traffic to speak of (several thousand visitors per year) and the rest generate less than 1000 visitors per year. All have high bounce rates and low conversions.

It would be nice to keep them live as I think some are okay and could be rewritten/re-purpose over time but maybe in light of our Panda penalty it might be better to just to save them offline, let them go to 404 errors and rewritten/re-purpose them another time?

-We did create a very nice 404 page with category navigation and huge search bar so I am leaning more toward this option.
..
Thank in Advance!

[FedeEinhorn]

I would definitely set a 404 on those pages. Even more when you got a manual penalty. Although perhaps they aren't carrying any penalty nor benefit, why have them redirected to the index? You said you build a nice 404 page, then set all those bad pages to 404s and let the user/crawler decide what to do when they reach there (search for another page, or go to your homepage by clicking your home link).

Just avoid ANYTHING that can cause you any further damage!

[LesleyPaone]

If it were me dealing with this, this is what I would do. I would craft a 404 page that has your most popular articles on it. Then right below the navigation in a very obvious place, I would Put an error message that says the article has been removed or what ever you want really. Then I would follow your page guides and have a list of several other articles that the person might like. Be sure in all of this to send the 404 status code with the header and make sure that no other pages link to the 404 page. If you use a different 404 page for the site, I would set it so that this special page only works with the articles that you are removing.

[k9byron]

Excellent! Thanks guys! That was really stressing me out trying to figure out the best thing to do with those pages ...404 it is