Old forum with 404s, what should I do?

[jordanayresaira]

Hello,

So I'm helping out some friends with their SEO. I've just run a Screaming Frog crawl of their entire site (which took hours and hours I might add). They used to have a forum connected to the site, which is no longer active. Google is still indexing all of the old URLs, which unsurprisingly return 404 errors.

What should they do to prevent Google from indexing these pages? That's assuming they need to do anything at all. They don't have access to these old forum posts and therefore won't be able to fix the URL or resource adding a 301 redirect pointing to the most relevant alternate page.

I'm new to SEO but my instinct is that they need to have the page return a 410 ‘Gone’ response code to give search engines a clear signal that the page no longer exists and won’t be returning, and removing the internal links to that URL or resource.

1. Is this interpretation correct?
2. What is the impact of leaving these 404s? There are over a thousand, so there's a lot

3. What should I recommend?

[GastonRiera]

Hi there,

You should be able to identify at least 2 types of pages:
1- The ones that are garbage.. 
2- Useful pages, with backlinks and/or traffic

On one hand, the garbage pages are ok to be 404'd. Google will eventually deindex those pages.
On the other hand, those pages that are usefull, you could redirect them to a page that is usefull, please do not redirect all to the homepage.

That said, i'll answer your questions:

1. Is this interpretation correct?Yes is a correct interpretation, before setting 410's, check whether there are any usefull page that can be redirected. Also, keep in mind that 410 is a really strong signal and literally kills the URL and will not ever rank nor be indexed.
2. What is the impact of leaving these 404s? There are over a thousand, so there's a lot. There is no harm, as long as they still serve 404s. Google will eventually demote those pages. Remember that you are also giving 404s to GoogleBot. 3. What should I recommend?_ Consider an usefull page and others leave them as 404._

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR

[jordanayresaira]

Thanks Gaston!