diberry - 6:42 am on Jul 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

Thanks for that thread, Zivush - I did read it recently, but had already done my 301s before that.

The reason I did the 301s was not for SEO purposes, but because some of those pages got enough traffic that I didn't want visitors getting 404s when their topic of interest was still available on my site.

Which brings up another point I didn't think to mention: I removed quite a few pages in 2011 - close to 40%. All those 404s didn't seem to hurt the site at all - it kept flourishing. Until Penguin anyway. Dunno if it would see 404s as spammy (I can't imagine why, but then I don't know everything spammers get up to).