Re-pointing 301 redirects - is this OK?

[c41lum]

Hi guys,

About 5 years ago we did a whole site restructure and we hand redirecting about 500 old URLs to new URLs.

The new URLs we redirected to, our now irrelevant since they have been superseded by new products on newer URLs. (stay with me, im confusing myself).

The question is can I go back and re 301 the old original URLs as they have quite a lot of good quality links as there wasn't much comp in my niche back then so our old URLs got quite a lot of links. For instance one old URL has a nice PR7 link that now points to a 404 page.

Can I do the re-re-direct or will big google frown upon me once again.

[tedster]

Yes - your thinking is right on the money, not only for Google but for your visitors. Definitely change those old 301 target pages to a new url that resolves. It might take a while for Google to test and trust them, but in mnay cases it will be pretty quick.

[c41lum]

Yeah thanks for the confirm... its always nice to have faith in the hard slog im about to undertake.

Does this mean that the new URL will get the link juice from the PR7 page?

Cheers

[tedster]

If all goes well, yes. Most of the link juice will pass through.

[c41lum]

Sounds good we have about 600 old urls as well which we have been 404ing when we should have been 301 them to a relevant page..

[Shaddows]

Once it works through, you might even see a net benefit to the domain, beyond the PR retention. 301 -> 404 is not a good result, especially 600 of them (depending of course on your total page count)

[c41lum]

Hi Shadow, we have about 40,000 pages indexed. We recently spotted a problem so we now have 8,294 404 pages according to webmaster world.

I didn't think G frowned upon have too many 404's?

[c41lum]

I have removed the internal links to the majority of thes 404 pages.

[c41lum]

Should I 301 the pages to my home page instead of doing a 404.

[c41lum]

Hi guys I just had a read of this from back in 2006 [webmasterworld.com...]
is it still relevant. If so it sounds like I should probably be returning a 410 back to G instead of a 404.

[tedster]

Google treats a 410 and a 404 as the same - in your case the 410 is more technically accurate, but it won't make a difference to Google.

I would definitely NOT 301 redirect 8,000 urls to the Home Page. I would redirect them to the urls that are most on topic compared to the original url.

You might do a study to discover which of those currently 404 urls backlinks and/or are getting visitor traffic. Then make a case by case decision on what you will do.

Sometimes, in the case of a very "big" product, you do best by putting content back at that url that informs the visitor and the search engine what happened with that product. If a newer better version is now on the market, then offer a link to the new page instead of a redirect. There's nothing better than reclaiming a "lost" url with strong backlinks.