Fix paginated 404 errors caused by deleting old posts

[lorino]

Anyone know a good way to handle fixing paginated 404 errors that have been caused by deleting old posts?

For example, the following paginated pages used to exist, but since removing and redirecting posts that fall into the main feed and related categories, there is no longer the last page(s) in the paginated series.:

http://domain.com/blog/page/581/

http://domain.com/blog/category-1/page/27/

http://domain.com/blog/category-6/page/14/

Google has identified all these examples as errors in WMT. We have over 250 of 404 errors containing "page"!

We could do 302 redirects, though the trouble is that these pages will exist again once we create more content. Also, because there's now a large quantity of these since we started cleaning up blog and it would be very challenging to monitor when to turn off the temporary redirects.

Is there a good server-side solution to address this?

Notes:
• Wordpress CMS, NGINX server
• Using rel=prev/next markup with canonicals on paginated series.
• Posts were deleted because the content was very poor and wasn't even valuable to refresh.

[goodroi]

IMHO Not every 404 error needs to be fixed. If you have deleted a section of your site because it was poor quality and never gained traffic, I would leave it as a 404 or 410. If Googlebot is the only thing discovering the 404 you might not have to care.

If you have real humans encountering 404, you want to help connect them with the most relevant content. Some people get lazy and redirect everything to the homepage and that is not a good idea.

Ok, so now we are 301 redirecting to the relevant page. That is great for most sites but if you have a huge site you need to be careful. You don't want an out of control 10 mb htaccess file which can happen if you list every individual url redirect for a very large site that has been around for over 10 years. So you can use some wildcard redirects to slim down your file.

[lucy24]

I would leave it as a 404 or 410.

Isn't a 410 precisely what the question is about? A 404 happens by itself-- or within the CMS-- but a 410 has to be explicitly coded.

Hurrah, nginx server, that means I don't even have to think about how to express the 410 rule because I only do Apache.

We could do 302 redirects

Please say that was a typo for 301. Even though the URL might recur at some later time, as the thread gets longer, a 302 still isn't appropriate, because there will then be different content.

Is it likely that a lot of humans have this specific page bookmarked? If not, you can probably just ignore the 404s. It's nice if there can be a special error page just for people who request nonexistent discussion pages, but it's tricky to code unless the CMS already has this option. (Or, of course, if you're rolling your own. And even then it will involve some type of server lookup.)

[lorino]

Thank you both for your replies.

I suggested 302 over 301 as the redirects are not permanent. The paginated series will eventually reach these page numbers again in which we'd want to turn off the redirects. I was thinking I could setup up some logic to 302 redirect recently vacated paginated URLs to the first page in the series.

But after reading both of your responses, I'm more in the opinion of where I began when I first started working on the site – don't worry about them and leave them alone. I'm just sick of seeing them in WMT.