301 lots of old pages to home page

[bhsiao]

Will it hurt me if i redirect a few hundred old pages to my home page?

I currently have a mess on my hands with many 404's showing up after moving my site to a new ecommerce server. We have been at the new server for 2 years but still have 337 404s showing up in google webmaster tools. I don't think it would affect users as very few people woudl find those old links but I don't want to mess with google.

Also, how much are those 404s hurting my rank?

[RyanKent]

404s are a natural part of the internet. At times, content is moved and deleted on any site. Your site is not penalized from Google because you have 404 pages.

The primary issue for 404 pages is if any site has linked to the page, the link's value is lost. Also landing on a 404 page is a bad user experience.

If you can look at your known 404 links and redirect each one to the most appropriate page on your site, that would be the best all around. If you redirect the pages to your home page, that is certainly the easy way out for you, but it is not the best user experience. Also you will lose the value of relevancy from anchor text along with link juice leakage.

[dmac]

You should try to 301 as many of the dead pagoes as possible to any relevant page you can find. This will pass on the link juice to the new page, especially if it's related content. Otherwise the link juice will be lost and eventually the search engines will drop those pages out of their index. I know doing a couple hundred pages is HUGE task, so I would focus on the most valuable pages first. Ryan is right, 404's is a fact of life. I think it's best to create a custom 404 that your visitors won't mind landing on. For this it's best to be creative, try to make them laugh or smile. Most importantly, give them something to click on. this will allow you to recapture an otherwise lost customer. The very last thing you want them to do is click on their browsers back button.Any visitor can essentially navigate to any of our other pages even though they didn't actually get the page they were originally looking for. Good luck!