Coping with a site redesign and old deep links

How to deal with deep links to now non-existant pages

[tankman]

A recent site redesign has left many sites that deep links to us with 404s.

What's the best method (for google pagerank) to point these links to the new urls?

http-equiv="Refresh"?
404's redirect to homepage in .htaccess?

thanks.

[pixel_juice]

IMO the best method would be to use a custom 404 page. So put

ErrorDocument 404 /error.php

in your htaccess (if your host supports this)

Then make error.php which should be a 'smart' 404 page which checks what page was requested. If it's an old url that has moved, it 301 (permanently) redirects to the new location. If the page genuinely doesn't exist, it should give a 404 error as usual.

The 301s should help pass along pagerank etc to the new pages, and also help search engines get the new urls in the index quickly. Most search engines don't really like meta refreshes and other javascripty redirects too much.