How to avoid 404 errors when taking a page off?

[ivan.precisodisso]

So...

We are running a blog that was supposed to have great content.

Working at SEO for a while, I discovered that is too much keyword stuffing and some SEO shits for wordpress, that was supposed to rank better.

In fact. That worked, but I'm not getting the risk of getting slaped by the Google puppy-panda.

So we decided to restard our blog from zero and make a better try.

So. Every page was already ranking in Google.

SEOMoz didn't make the crawl yet, but I'm really sure that the crawlers would say that there is a lot of 404 errors.

My question is: can I avoid these errors with some tool in Google Webmasters in sitemaps, or shoud I make some rel=canonicals or 301 redirects.

Does Google penalyses me for that? It's kinda obvious for me that the answer is YES.

Please, help

[ivan.precisodisso]

Thanks for your help.

[gmk1567]

There won't be any penalty if 404 pages are redirected to other pages. At the same time Google prefers to see 404 error for pages that are not available.

Couple of steps may reduce 404s:

1. Check on page / internal links if they are working URLs and update them with valid URLs

2. If you are linking your pages from different site, check the URLs used

3. If you are using free or paid directories, paid campaigns etc. check if the URLs are valid