Broken links shall i put them in my htaccess file to generate juice

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, when i had to rebuild my website after my hosting company made an error, i lost over 10,000 pages and lost many thousands of links coming to my site. What i want to know is, instead of trying to recreate those pages again which would take me a long time, should i put them into my htacess file and have them point back into my site.

so for example, if i have a link coming to my site to an article which could be, holidays in benidorm are not selling well, would it be a good idea to have that link pointed at the main benidorm section which is benidorm news.

And if i had an article which was people are finding it hard to lose weight, instead of writing a new article could i have the link pointing to my health section?

If this is the correct way of doing it to grab back some link juice, would it slow my site down and how many links could i put in my htacess file. So what i am trying to say is, if i put in say 1000 redirects into my htaccess file, would it slow my site down and is this a wise thing to do or should i just let the links go.

[ClaireH-184886]

cheers keri, i have read the information and i am now putting it in place and see how things move along. i have gone through all the 404s and i have found that i am losing around 9,000 links. it will take me a long time to get all the links in the htacess file. and i am just about to post a question about my hosting company as they are telling me that i need a new server over this so i am not sure if i should stick with them or move my site, but anyway, thanks for the help on this 404 problem

[RobertMackey]

Well you could let the links go to the graveyard but why so - Have you time to manually rewrite specific content around the targeted keyword and associated link that points to that old location ?

Could you also use http://archive.org/web/web.php to get a source of most of your old site and manually rewrite the page content with a view to doing the above method.

Also you state the hosting company lost over 10,000 pages, im assuming you have closed all avenues about backups from them to source the website pages ?

Apart from the above i cant think of anything only to let those links go --

Rob

[KeriMorgret]

Stephanie Change of Distiled wrote a good post about dealing with expired content and lots of 404 pages, and what you should do with those pages. It's at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content. She talks about where you might want to redirect these pages to, how it should look to the user, etc.