301 redirect 404 to homepage bad for SEO?

[surenot]

I run a small forum and I deleted a board containing large amount of threads and post so started getting a huge amount of 404 in my webmaster tools account. What I did is to redirect all invalid (404) posts, threads and forums to homepage and a few more deleted pages!

1. Is this something that negatively impacts SEO?
2. If I let the URLs to return 404 what should I do just ignore the warning from Google.
3. Too many 404 bad for SEO.

Please help me to make this right?

[aakk9999]

This is a bad idea and Google advises against it.

You should have left these to return 404 and not worry about 404 errors in WMT unless these are internal links on your site.

[netmeg]

What you're creating are called 'soft 404s' which are 404's that actually resolve to a page - in your case the home page. This is not a good thing.

Contrary to what you may hear elsewhere, Google *expects* you to have 404s. Pages expire, they disappear. It's normal.

If your entire site suddenly turns 404, then yea, you have a problem. Otherwise, don't worry about it. You might want to investigate whether or not you can return a 410 instead of a 404 for those missing forum pages (410 is a more "permanently gone" signal) but I haven't noticed much of a difference myself in how Google handles them. But just let them 404.

Here's some Google reading on the subject:

[support.google.com...]

(opps, aakk9999 slipped in while I was typing)

[surenot]

WOW an aye opening replies guys will fix it right away.

Should I simply ignore the report?
What should I do with SEO juice?

Thanks!

[netmeg]

Don't worry about "SEO juice" and ignore the report. Just make sure you yourself are not still linking to any of the removed pages.

[surenot]

Awesome! One last thing guys please. Is it safe to redirect 404 errors to custom 404 page using .htaccess? Is Google cool with that? :)

[not2easy]

Google prefers a custom 404 to the server default that just says something like "Page Not Found". They suggest you offer navigation links there to other parts of your site where visitors might want to go. They don't want a bunch of ads there. You don't need to "redirect" for a custom 404, just create the page, it should be in the root directory and add one line to your htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 /YOUR404PageNameHere.html

(or

.php

, whichever applies)
do not use the entire URL (

http://

etc...) when you add the name of your page.

[lucy24]

I haven't noticed much of a difference myself in how Google handles them

Officially there's no difference in indexing. But a 410 definitely makes the googlebot stop crawling a lot sooner. (This is anecdotal in the sense that I'm looking at their behavior on my own sites. But there's no reason to think google would treat me differently from everyone else on the planet ;))

Is it safe to redirect 404 errors to custom 404 page using .htaccess?

Not if you mean "redirect" in the strict sense, because then all your 404s turn into 302s. But yes, you can absolutely have a custom 404 page. The wording is

ErrorDocument 404 /missing.html
ErrorDocument 410 /gone.html

et cetera. Do not repeat not include protocol-plus-domain in the filename, because that's what turns it into a redirect.

If you like, you can use the same physical document for both 404 and 410. Most of the time, human visitors don't care whether the page used to exist or not; all that matters is it isn't there now. Do make sure to have a custom 410 page for humans, because the apache default is intimidating.

Note also that you can have different error documents for specific directories; you'll just need a supplemental htaccess. This might be a good approach if your forums were in a separate directory and you've deleted the entire contents of the directory. If you do this you will of course have to keep the directory, even if it now contains nothing except an .htaccess file and a 410 page.

[surenot]

Great support guys thanks a lot.
One more thing. Is it more SEO friendly to return 404 header on the same URL (Forum show a message invalid post and returns header 404 but URL remains the same) or to redirect 404 to a different URL (custom 404 page that will have URL some like not-found.html)

[phranque]

this is what you want:

returns header 404 but URL remains the same

[not2easy]

404 usually shows the URL of the page that was not found. So long as the server returns a 404 header, that is the important thing.

If you are using a CMS like WP, there is a 404.php in the default theme (and in every theme I've seen), you can edit that to be your custom 404 page, then put it back where you found it. If you use the WP 404, you probably don't need the custom page in your htaccess file because it is handled within WP - but if you have pages & folders outside of the WP directory, follow the original instructions too.

[surenot]

Outstanding support guys thanks bit time bye.

[lucy24]

or to redirect 404 to a different URL (custom 404 page

The custom 404 page can live anywhere on your site, and have any name you want. No redirection involved. That's what the ErrorDocument directive is for.

Normally people would never see the "real" URL of your error documents, unless there's been a mistake of some type. (The summer before last, Bing somehow learned the real name of one of my custom 410 pages. So now when they ask for it by name they get a 404 even though the document is right there.)

[lucy24]

But this is a whole forum we're talking about. It's hardly likely that each individual forum thread would have some permanent page that's uniquely adapted to the content of that one thread. In fact the only way this could happen in practice is if the threads were archived as static html, resulting in a one-for-one URL change.