Increase in 404's

[AdvanceSystems]

Hi,

We recently did a website upgrade and as a result url structure changed. There is 140 404's in Google webmaster. Just wondering on best best practice.

1. What should be done with pages that are defiantly not being used any more? For example we used to how .com/why-choose-us* this section is gone for Good - Should I redirect to closest page on site such as .com/about or noindex all together?

2. We also had lots of pages that were on a similar topic but now have condensed these into one or two pages on the new site. Is it OK to 301redirect 10+ 404's to one page on the new site. These will only be redirected to closely related topics so from a user point of view the new presented content will be fine. (Is this bad from a search engine point of view as in pointing lots of old 404's to one particualr page on new site)

Your input is welcomed.

Thanks,

[AdvanceSystems]

Ok thanks guys for your input.

As per your suggestion, yes I could redirect multiple 404's to one page on the new site as the content would be relevant to the end user. As per pages that have no relevancy any-more I think I will just allow them to drop from the index.

Cheers for the link also.

Regards,

Glen

[MikeRoberts]

A one-to-one redirect is usually best but as long as where you redirect to is the most relevant alternative then you are fine. If the original page that is now 404'd was receiving essentially no traffic and wasn't ranking then you can likely let the 404 stick and it will drop from the index (assuming it was there already). If one new page is relevant for 2, 3, 4+ older pages and there's nowhere more relevant to redirect them to, then it is perfectly fine to 301 all of those to the same place. What you don't want to do is blindly decide to bulk redirect everything one level up or to your homepage without doing your research first. You want to make sure that the new URL you're pointing to will serve your customers/visitors as best as it can.

And as Simon said in his response, Cyrus' post on redirects is a great resource for answers on what you should, or shouldn't, be doing.

[simon_realbuzz]

Redirecting multiple pages to one page is ok so long as there is relevance, after all you want to send your users to somewhere that is of use to them. What you don't want to do is just point all 404s to one page such as your home page.

I think the whole redirect issue was expertly covered by Cyrus recently in this great blog post.