External URLs - ones you can't reach out

[Bio-RadAbs]

My fellow Mozzers,

I have been reviewing our Google Webmaster error reports and noticed high url errors. These URLs are generated from international sites, mainly China. Upon further inspection, these look to be links to dynamic URLs that are no longer active on our site. (search pages)

China is linking to old URLs that simply spew out a 'Bad Request' pages now. Problems I face is that:

• I can't contact these chinese sites to remove/edit the URLs.
• I could work with my developers to identify the urls and direct them all to the homepage, but is that good. The URLs are still present.
• Some of these look like pages that haven't been updated in a while, so now I have links from sites that are archived, or "dead"

Have you tackled anything like this before? Thoughts are welcome

Thanks

[Highland]

I would just 404 the pages (provided they're not already) and move on. There's nothing wrong with having dead links to your site. Some people would recreate the pages to try and capture some of that link juice but if they're from abandoned Chinese sites I don't think they would provide the high quality you need.

If you want the best of both worlds, have the page return a 404 but return some content that would direct anyone who happened to click in to some other part of your site.

[Bio-RadAbs]

I'm actually looking into creating a dynamic block on a static 404 page. The block would feed in products/data based on the URL string, so it recognizes the URL and displays relevant content.

The thing with the chinese urls is that, they introduced a unique character to the URL and that's why I don't get a 404 page but a 'bad request' page. Servers don't recognize the unique character. In talks with the developer to see if we can do something to direct them to a 404.

Thanks

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Agreed.  Great answer Highland.