As far as 'header redirect' are you talking about a meta refresh redirect rather than a 301 htaccess redirect? I thought meta refresh redirects were not necessarily a good thing to do in the eyes of search engines?
Also, isn't redirecting a URL of a page that no longer exists to the home page actually a violation of Google's guidelines?
I'm currently doing a project to resolve many 404s being reported in Google Webmaster account.
Many of them are simply malformed URLs (live URLs with a period at the end or a comma or an equal sign, etc.) from the referrer's side - yet some carry a vaulable backlink authority, so they should be 301'd, in my opinion to the intended URL, when that is obvious.
However, if there is no longer a close match page - say for an old but valued backlink - to ideally redirect to, is it OK to - in attempt to retain the backlink value - redirect what are really 404 pages to the homepage or a top landing page? If so, is there a limit to the number of redirects to resolve a 404?
Thanks for any clarification of the issue raised above.
