What's the best way to redirect categories & paginated pages on a blog?

[kking4120]

I'm currently re-doing my blog and have a few categories that I'm getting rid of for housecleaning purposes and crawl efficiency. Each of these categories has many pages (some have hundreds). The new blog will also not have new relevant categories to redirect them to (1 or 2 may work). So what is the best place to properly redirect these pages to? And how do I handle the paginated URLs?

The only logical place I can think of would be to redirect them to the homepage of the blog, but since there are so many pages, I don't know if that's the best idea. Does anybody have any thoughts?

[KeriMorgret]

What blog platform are you using? That'll help us provide a more specific answer. Thanks!

[kking4120]

This post is deleted!

[kking4120]

Hi Keri! This will all be done in WordPress.

[NoisyLittleMonkey]

If you have access to the .htaccess file on your server you can use this website http://www.htaccessredirect.net/ to generate content for it. The redirect directory should do it.

If not the you can use php to create a 301 redirect like so

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 
header("Location: http://www.New-Website.com/test.php");?>

and the final option would be to email your hosting company and ask them to do it.