Website structure changed, what to do with old inexistent pages.

[fischermx]

I have a dinamic site, which had certain directory structure, which ended up not liking me. The site is not even complete, but was indexed already, about 30 pages.

Now, I have a new structure but I see I receive some traffic from the old pages.
What is the most appropiate way to redirect?
For now, I'm just catching all the 404s, and redirecting to the root via a 301.
Is this correct?

[grandpa]

That's exactly what I'm doing, correct or not. It works. I'd much rather have a visitor on the home page instead of reading a 404-Not Found error page.

[flemmingelimar]

hi
If you have deleted the pages - and therefor the user receives a 404 info -

you can do to things:
direct to your startpage
or - if the pages is deleted - addurl to Google telling that the pages in not valid anymore - they will then remove it in the index.

The best is to do a combination of both - to be shure :-)