To 301 or 404?

I have tens of thousands of bad pages that got indexed.

[maximillianos]

Hello everyone.

I'm doing some house cleaning. I found a bug that was causing tens of thousands of bad urls to get in G's index. Right now I have them just 404ing. But in light of the recent Panda epidemic, I was wondering if I should be 301 redirecting them to the main url they came from? The pages never returned any content.

Would Google rather see them stay 404s? Or should I just redirect them back to the source page?

Thanks for any advice!

[maximillianos]

Got my answer here from Google themselves:

[seroundtable.com...]

[g1smd]

404 or 410 if content has gone, 301 if it has moved elesewhere.

[maximillianos]

Yup, that is what I confirmed from the Google article/quotes as well.

So for my "mistake" links that got indexed, I'm using 404.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Don't robots.txt exclude them or their folder either, if 404 is what they are that's what you want Google to keep seeing. Make 100% sure you have no links pointing to any of the pages and they'll eventually fall off the radar.