Fresh site on same domain

[Stealth1]

I am sure this is a common topic but I couldn't find exactly what I wanted to know. I have had a webstore up for 2 years now but it was utter crap and was poorly indexed.

So we created a whole new site and have that live now and it is being indexed very well to start by google.

The current issue is that google is showing 818 pages in the not found section of Webmaster tools, these are all from the old site. They are all "404 (not found)" and the number is has grown from a few hundred to this. I am wondering if I these pages will be unindexed shortly or if I need to do something more to make speed this up.

[eltercerhombre]

If the new site has pages that may be considered the same (same product or same category) you could probably 301 the old URL's to the new ones. Just think it: does it make sense, as an end user, to be redirected to the new one?

If not then just be patient, the old ones wil be unindexed, it's a mmatter of time.

[Stealth1]

It would take ages to redirect all of the pages so I guess I will just wait it out.

[TheMadScientist]

By not redirecting you are losing all credit for any inbound links to the pages, and providing what would seem to be a poor user experience. Regular expression use usually makes it fairly easy to redirect 100s if not 1000s of pages at a time, and personally I would recommend doing it, not only for search engine rankings, but for your visitors who, if they're anything like me, will click back as soon as they see 404 and probably avoid your site in the future...

Personally, if you give me a 404 I might click another link to your site, but two in a row and I'm usually done visiting you. It doesn't really matter what the circumstances are on your side, because there's usually enough other sites with the information I'm looking for that do work I don't need to see what you have to say or offer at all, so once I see 404 a couple of time instead of what I'm looking for you go on the mental 'don't visit, doesn't work' list and don't get visits from me... I don't have any vested interest in where I get my information from (neither do most visitors), so if a site doesn't work like it should I just move on to the next one, and I would guess quite a few other people do too.

[tedster]

When the url schemas are too crazy and the number of URLs is too large, I've still had good results by only building redirects for pages with strong backlinks, or for pages that are otherwise strong entry pages for whatever reason.