Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This site should help you: detectmobilebrowsers.com

Based on this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA&feature=player_embedded

I believe there is nothing wrong with redirecting entire directories. Matt seems to suggest one could even redirect multiple pages to a homepage, and while this isn't ideal, its a legitimate method recognized by Google.

So I was browsing Monster.com and realized that they have a pop-up floating AdSense ad when you scroll halfway down the page....check it out: http://jobsearch.monster.com/search/Full-Time_8?jt=142&q=Search-Engine-Optimization-__28SEO__29&sort=dt.rv.di

How are they allowed to do this?

As I understand, this is not allowed. https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182

In order to ensure a good experience for users and advertisers, publishers participating in the AdSense program may not:

• Compensate users for viewing ads or performing searches, or promise compensation to a third party for such behavior.
• Encourage users to click the Google ads using phrases such as "click the ads", "support us", "visit these links" or other similar language.
• Direct user attention to the ads using arrows or other graphical gimmicks.
• Place misleading images alongside individual ads.
• Place ads in a floating box script.
• Format ads so that they become indistinguishable from other content on that page.
• Format site content so that it is difficult to distinguish it from ads.
• Place misleading labels above Google ad units. For instance, ads may be labelled "Sponsored Links" or "Advertisements", but not "Favourite Sites" or "Today's Top Offers".

Sounds like a pretty clear 301 redirect

That's how I see it....the old homepage was at ..../af/index.asp -- this will definitely get 301ed, its just about the other 800+ random URLs.

There is no penalty for redirecting a page that could otherwise have a 404? Or, once GoogleBot views a 404 on a particular page, is it too late at that point to 301 it? With the "index.asp" page, it still makes sense to redirect because there are links around the web pointing to that location, and those visitors need the redirect.

I'm helping on a site that has tons of content and recently moved from a 10 year old .ASP structure to WordPress. There are ~800 404s, with 99% of them in the same directory that is no longer used at all. The old URL structures offer no indication of what the old page contents was.

So, there is basically no way to manually redirect page by page to the new site at this point.....is there any reason not to redirect that entire old directory to the new homepage?

Matt Cutts seems to think its OK to point an entire old directory to a new homepage, but its not as good as the 1:1 redirects: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633

Any thoughts?