Can I leave old content on server to stop 404's

SEO issues with 404 redirects

[maisiefantaisie]

I have a website that sells widgets and has ranked first place in google for widgets and other widget related searches in the UK for a few years. I recently rebuilt the whole site and deleted a lot of unwanted product URL's. A lot of the URL's that I deleted have incoming links from other sites and so now return lots of 404's. My AWstats show 34617 4040 error hits last month. My website dropped 3-4 places after this.

If I were to leave all the deleted URL files on my server then I presume the page would be retrieved whenever a user clicked on a link, so that page would not return a 404.

But, as the page would no longer be in my site index or sitemap would I gain any SEO benefit from those links and would it cause me any problems with google?

Does this make sense?

[phranque]

you should either:
- create pages for those urls with content relevant to the inbound link anchor text and a reasonable navigation to other content on your site.

OR

- 301 redirect those urls to equivalent content on the redesigned site.

OR

- if they are truly permanently gone and you are ready to lose any benefit from inbound links, provide a 410 (Gone) response instead of a 404 (Not Found).

[spelling edit]

[edited by: phranque at 10:09 am (utc) on Jun 1, 2010]

[maisiefantaisie]

Thanks phranque, you actually inspired me. I did 301's for some pages that have moved forever. And then....I spent the last 2 days building a new archive page for old URL's, all my links have come back home! Thanks.