Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for a great answer. There are not links to these pages on the website, only from search engine results. While I thought the pages could be restored, I'm realizing now they don't mix with a new site update, so it is either:

a) remake the content.

b) let them 404.

c) 301 redirect.

You think it would be better to let them go to a useful 404 page than to redirect?

For the users' sake of not being taken to old content, or will that boost the homepage's ranking/authority?

I'm SEOing for a theatre. We've got show pages that rank when searching for the business, but are outdated as the shows are from past years. The pages aren't accessible at all from the site now, but still exist in domain and are linked to by google.

If you search the business, the results are:

1. [biz name]

2. [biz name] - tickets

3-6. outdated shows

Should these pages be left up, or taken down and redirected home?

Would there be any seo boost to the homepage from 301ing them home, or do you think it'd be more beneficial to have more results available as entry points into the site?

Through searching, I can find lots of discussion regarding "dash vs underscore", but am having trouble with an even simpler question:

Is there any SEO difference between using

http://www.broadway.com/shows/milliondollarquartet.php

vs.

http://www.broadway.com/shows/million-dollar-quartet.php

I've read through the Redirect guide here already but can't get this down in my .htaccess

I want to redirect some pages specifically (/contactinfo.html to the new /contact.php)

And I want all other pages (not all have equivalent pages on the new site) to redirect to my new (index.php) homepage.

How can I set it up so that some specific pages redirect directly, and all others go to one page?

I already have the specific oldpage.html -> newpage.php redirects in place, just need to figure out the broad one for everything else.

If my audience searches both "theatre" and "theater", how can I keyword optimize for both terms while maintaining consistency on my site?

Does google at all see these as interchangeable, or are they treated as completely different words?

city] theater and [city] theatre are our 3 and 6 best performing keywords, with theater getting roughly twice as many hits.