301 vs 410

[KathleenDC]

Hello everyone!

I'm going through a large list of old 404 links that search console has given me and a lot of these links need to be 301'd. My question is, should I 410 some of these links if I can't find a good place to 301 to? Or is there another thing I should do that is better practice.

Thanks!

[Chris_Hickman]

If there is any possibility of relevant backlinks to these missing pages I would recommend 301 redirects to your homepage or other related pages to pass on that link juice.

[KathleenDC]

Many of these don't. Should I 410 these instead? I'm thinking I might just 301 all of them to our homepage. They are quiet old

[Mustansar]

Hi Paul,

I also would not recommend 410 for this purposes. I think, you should go for 301 this will help by all means. In the case of any niche links to those old pages or any osrt juice you may have on those pages will shift over.

Hope it would helps

[MikeRoberts]

There is nothing "bad practices" about allowing a non-existent page to 404. People often times forget that a 404 isn't a signal that something is broken and needs fixing, its just a status code that returns "Not Found". Sometimes it makes sense for things not to be found on your site because they were never there in the first place. 404s eventually stop being crawled and indexed.

You shouldn't just bulk redirect things to your homepage though. Its always best to have a 301 point to the most relevant page based on what the original page was. If there is no most relevant page, have you considered 301-ing them to one step up in the site navigation? (i.e. a category page or hub page)