I am working on a Wordpress Website. It has 404 errors with around 400 urls. I can permanently redirect them to the parent category or the home page. I want to know whether this is the good idea. As there are 400 urls to be redirected, will it not be considered spamming by Google. Your feedback please. Thanks in advance.
Any time a URL that was ‘live’ becomes ‘dead’, you should put a redirect on it so that it doesn’t lead to a 404 error page. This is for the benefit search engines and real people, who may have bookmarked the old URL or followed a link to it from somewhere else.
The redirect should take visitors to the most relevant ‘live’ page. If there isn’t an equivalent page any more, either because you’ve removed the topic altogether or because you’ve reorganised the site so the content is spread across different pages, the parent category would probably be the best page to go for.
I would always try to avoid redirecting dead URLs to the home page. It’s frustrating for users who think they are following a ‘deep link’ straight to the information they’re after, only to find it dumps them unceremoniously at the home page without any further explanation, and it reflects badly on a site when it does this. If you have quite a lot of pages that don’t have any relevant alternative that you can redirect to, it might be worth putting up a new page to say “Sorry, we’ve reorg’d the site and that page isn’t here any more” and then give them some top-level navigation to show what else the site has to offer instead, and redirect those ‘dead’ URLs to that.
Thanks for the timely help. This explains.