How to handle old 404's

[meelosh]

I have a site that has been around a long time..this morning i was checking the WMT for the site and found almost 50 404 not found in crawl errors.
these are old pages that have not existed for over a year. of the 50 i can 301 maybe 5 to relevant content but not the rest and i have always not liked over doing the 301. how do i handle this correctly? do i just let the others 404 and eventually they willdisappear from my errors or is there something else i should do....they are from sites that donot carry much weight so i am not concerned about the juice but want to deal with it in a manner that does not loose trust with george.

[tedster]

It's OK to let them stay 404 - there's no penalty from it - but check the rest of the data to learn where Google is finding those backlinks. If they are internal, you can clean it up that way. If they are external, then write to the websites involved. And if they are from very strong pages that you can't change, then you might want to put appropriate content back at that URL so you can reclaim that backlink power.

[meelosh]

thanks tedster..they are not internal so i will follow your advice and try contact the sites they are coming from....and/or alternatively produce content for the urls. thanks for the advice glad not penalisable

[g1smd]

Make sure the error message shown for those pages is clear and contains links to other places on your site that the visitor may be interested in.

[pageoneresults]

How do I remove an outdated page or link?
[Google.com...]

If outdated pages from your site appear in the search results, ensure that the pages return a status of either 404 (not found) or 410 (gone) in the header.

Personally I'd serve 410 Gone for documents that you know do not exist anymore. Chasing down Webmasters to update their links is a time consuming process. There may be a handful worth contacting but for the most part, it's not worth the effort involved.

Google will report 410s as 404s in GWT.

410 Gone is explicit in its meaning. 404 Not Found is generic. If there are links pointing to 404 documents, you'll see requests for them appear as long as the links exist. The best practice in this instance is to 410 Gone those that apply and let your 404 serve its primary purpose. You're better off addressing all of this at the source, your documents, not those outside of your control.

You'll definitely want to review each and every one of those 404s. There may be opportunities to capture inbound link equity. Sometimes, it's easier to capture those 404s and 301 them to their correct destinations, conserve whatever equity is available with those inbound links. It's quicker too. Hopefully at some point the Webmaster on the other end will realize that they have 301 > 200 in their external links and will update the reference. That's the best you can do.