SEO redirects for removed pages

Question

Hi,

Apologies if SO is not the right place for this, but there are 700+ other SEO questions on here.

I'm a senior developer for a travel site with 12k+ pages. We completely redeveloped the site and relaunched in January, and with the volatile nature of travel, there are many pages which are no longer on the site. Examples:

/destinations/africa/senegal.aspx
/destinations/africa/features.aspx

Of course, we have a 404 page in place (and it's a hard 404 page rather than a 30x redirect to a 404).

Our SEO advisor has asked us to 30x redirect all our 404 pages (as found in Webmaster Tools), his argument being that 404's are damaging to our pagerank. He'd want us to redirect our Senegal and features pages above to the Africa page (which doesn't contain the content previously found on Senegal.aspx or features.aspx).

An equivalent for SO would be taking a url for a removed question and redirecting it to /questions rather than showing a 404 'Question/Page not found'.

My argument is that, as these pages are no longer on the site, 404 is the correct status to return. I'd also argue that redirecting these to less relevant pages could damage our SEO (due to duplicate content perhaps)? It's also very time consuming redirecting all 404's when our site takes some content from our in-house system, which adds/removes content at will.

Thanks for any advice,

Adam

Answer 1

As I know 404 is quite bad for SEO because your site won't get any PageRank for pages linked from somewhere but missing.

I would added another page, which will explain that due to redesign original pages are not available, offering links to some other most relevant pages. (e.g. to Africa and FAQ) Then this page sounds like a good 301 answer for those pages.

Answer 2

The correct status to return is 410 Gone. I wouldn't want to speculate about what search engines will do if they are redirected to a page with entirely different content.

Answer 3

This is actually a good idea. As described at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work (which is a good resource for the non seo people here)

404 is obviously not good. A 301 tells spiders/users that this is a permanent redirect of a source. The content should not get flagged as duplicate because you are not sending a 200 (good page) response and so there is nothing spidered/compared.

This IS kinda a grey hat tactic though so be careful, it would be much better to put actual 301 pages in place where it is looking for the page and also to find who posted the erroneous link and if possible, correct it.

Answer 4

I agree that 404 is the correct status, but than again you should take a step back and answer the following questions:

• Do these old pages have any inbound links?
• Did these old pages have any good, relevant content to the page you are 301'ing it to?
• Is there any active traffic that is trying to reach these pages?

While the pages may not exist I would investigate the pages in question with those 3 questions, because you can steer incoming traffic and page rank to other existing pages that either need the PR/traffic or to pages that are already high traffic.

With regards to your in house SEO saying you are losing PR this can be true of those pages have inbound links, because you they will be met with a 404 status code and will not pass link juice, since nothing exists there any more. That's why 301's rock.