Should I redirect 404s or should I eliminate them?

[teconsite]

Hello!

I am now checking a website that has been migrated months ago from osCommerce to Prestashop.
While I was checking crawl errors in search console I found a lot of 404s coming from the last website.

The urls are mainly 4 types:

• popup_image.php?pID=125&osCsid=507c27261ba5ca2568f06ce5bad2ebc9
• product-friendly-url-pr-125%3FosCsid....
• product-friendly-url-p-125%3FosCsid.....
• products_new.php?page=228

I've have realized that the parameter pId, and the number that comes after pr- and p- is the product Id in the new website, so I think our team will be able to create an script to redirect those.

My question is: Is it ok to send several urls to the same url?. I mean, the popup_image.php was not the product page, as its name says it's more like a popup page. We don't have now a pop up page for images, so I was thinking to send that url to the product page.

the one with the pr-  was product review page

the one with the p- was the product page

I was thinking on redirecting the 3 of them to the product page? Should I? Or should I just redirect the last one (p-) and eliminate the others from the index?

And... the ones with

• products_new.php?page=228

I was thinking to redirect all to the page 1 of new products.

Is it ok?

thank you!

[Joe.Robison]

Yes you can redirect the 3 URLs to the new product page and everything would be alright.

The question to consider though, would be if you had tens of thousands of product pages and so then would need tens of thousands of redirects. If the old pages did not get much or any traffic, or just the popup URL was hardly ever visited, it might not make sense to implement the redirects. Those redirects could slow down portions of your server or site while processing those redirects.

Essentially if you had a bunch of old pages that were just never useful, let them 404. If they were useful and linked to or in the index, then 301 redirect to the new page.

Hope that helps?

[Tymen]

Hi,

I think you are right. So to redirect them all to 1 page is good. I just had the same migration to a new site and redirected all traffic to one page on wich i explained to migration and offered them a quick menu for continuing further in the "new" shop.

Regards,

Tymen