301 Re-Direct

[Palmbourne]

Last Year I re-named a catergory on my site because it had bad backlinks, the new catergory is coming up the search engines nicely, in webmaster tools it shows the old catergory as a 404, would it be wise to put a 301 re-direct on to my new catergory, if not what is the best way to deal with it?

[Mike.Goracke]

If you 301 redirect the old category page that had the bad backlinks, you will be indirectly pointing those bad backlinks from the old category page to the new one.

If it shows as 404 in webmaster tools and you are no longer using that page, that means it is displaying the correct error. It should eventually be removed from Google's index if it is still in there or you could remove it from Google's index in WMT if you wanted to.

Hope this helps.

Mike