Googles position on 404 pages

Is this going to hurt me?

[flexsez]

Since the September crawl and before the subsequent update, I changed
a bunch of pages and directory structure to my site.

The pages I renamed and moved are scoring well in the serps, but
obviously no longer exist on my server.

I thought about recreating each page in question, but I feel that will
create a vicious circle of trying to time getting the pages off the server before G-Bot crawls again.

Is it ok to make my sites default 404 page resolve to a specific
page in my site for all of the pages in question?

The last thing I need to do is get banned. Seems like google is
getting very touchy about how you do things.

[gsx]

I set up a framed page - start with the meta for noindex, no follow and single frame of 100% x 100% containing the page required. Next time Google spider that page, you have told it not to index, whilst current referals still see your required page without any redirection.

After the page is about 12 months old, delete it - most indexes will have updated a few times in that time period (even AV :) )

[MarkHutch]

WOW, AV must be speeding up. :)

[mack]

If I was you I would set up an htaccess file at your root and 301 redirect Google bot (any any other traffic) to the correct page. If you have a lot of pages that have changed name this can be quite time consuming but well worth the effort. Basicaly if a user requests a page that is not there it redirects them to the correct new location. If you are not used to working with htaccess there have been a few great posts lately about this topic. you could try a site search for htaccess.

[JonB]

hm,what if you upload your pages to test them, then check with toobar and you get a visit by googlebot?i was testing my pages and i jsut didnt have time to finsih all pages this week. i am sure gogole bot will vist my unfinished site. but i doubt this can cause a penalty. i mean the same can happen if googlebot vists your site, crawls 50% and next day come back but site is down due to server error. so i belive they wont penalize you for this.i hope :)

[flexsez]

Thanks for input...

Has anyone actually gotten penalized for a 404 like
I am talking about?

[mack]

I had a server go down during a google craw. I didnt receive a penalty , but my site had "zero" page rank for a month.