Redirecting 404

[Mickelp]

Hi.

I'm working on a wordpress site, which got some old deleted pages indexed and now shows a 404 (also in the results)

As these old pages earlier got content and probably also some links pointing towards it, what would then be best practice to do?

Should i make an 301 redirect?

Make the 404 noindex?

[akshaysharma20]

Hi,
First of all if your non-existing site results are being displayed in search results(say Google) then you can either demote the sitelinks by going in to the Google Webmasters Tool(go to Configuration -->> Sitelinks)and submit it. 
Or, if in your case, it has some links pointing towards it then you can use a 301 redirect and redirect it to your customised 404 page which should could contain navigational options so the users do not leave the given site.

The Web Optimized 404 pages should contain:

• notification that the user has reached a page that does not exist
• a search box
• a easy to understand navigation system so the user can potentially find what they were orginally looking to access
• a link to the home page

If you want to know more, you can check this link on HTTP Status code and see what's best for you
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/http-status-codes

Hope this helps you.
Cheers!

[eyepaq]

Hi,

Should i make an 301 redirect?

** Only if you can actually redirect using 301 to pages that cover the same or have at least some connection with the old page. Otherwise there won't be too much benefit.

If you are not able to 301 redirect them to new specific pages you could 301 redirect those all to a single page that can act as a topic page  - a gateway.

Make the 404 noindex?

** That won't help. if google gets a 404 response code it will treat it as a not found page and it won't index / crawl the page anyway - so google's bot won't see anything on the page anyway including the no index tag.

Cheers.