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I deleted about 100 pages of stale content 6 months ago and they are currently returning 404's. The crawl diagnostics have pointed out 77 duplicate pages because of this. Should I redirect these as 301's to get rid of the error or keep them as 404's? Most of the pages still have some page authority but I don't want to get penalized. Just looking for the best solution. Thanks!

We want to implement breadcrumbs to improve the usability of our website - if we manually input breadcrumbs into the body of every page via our CMS are there any negative effects?

Thank you Moosa and Doug - your answers were very thoughtful and helpful!

Do you believe that reducing the # of footer links will have a positive impact by providing additional link juice to the important pages that I keep?

I have several pages that rank highly in the SERPs and these pages are linked directly to my homepage in the footer. I want to clean up my footer because I have too many site wide links but don't want to hurt the SERP rankings during the transition. Will removing these page links from the footer impact SERP rankings?