301 redirects to home page bad for SEO?

[marco]

I have many dead post, thread and forum links (I remove them and the link return 404) that have a ton of SEO juice so I am 301 redirecting them all to my home page? Is this something bad for SEO?

 

[ridgley]

If you have many bad link then yes it is.

 

[hoangvu]

I have many dead post, thread and forum links (I remove them and the link return 404) that have a ton of SEO juice so I am 301 redirecting them all to my home page? Is this something bad for SEO?

No problem you can do that without affecting SEO, I did it on my websites and didn't get any problems.

 

[marco]

It looks as Google doesn't like it so I will have to just return 404 error don't wanna risk it.
Thanks guys

 

[ericplotz1]

You don't want a 404. 301 is ok. I use 301 directs to rank sites.

 

[Maxwell]

Maxwell

I also am using this way
May it have a better way?

 

[marco]

I had pretty bad experience in the past with 301 redirecting one site to another and it looks like I haven't learned my lesson YET. Have to just leave deal link to return 404 as it should be and as Google advices.

 

[vishwa]

Yes! You can redirect the 404 pages to your home page. It will won't effect your rankings and SEO.

 

[marco]

I was redirecting 404 pages to homepage for month so I am gonna stop it and check what effect that will produce!

 

[ShoeNickel]

I have many dead post, thread and forum links (I remove them and the link return 404) that have a ton of SEO juice so I am 301 redirecting them all to my home page? Is this something bad for SEO?

You won't get any link juice from forum links. No point in 301 redirecting them

 

[marco]

My 404 error page looks has my website header and footer so many will probably continue checking the rest of the site!

I read a post where Google says that it wants us to leave the pages to return 404 and simply ignore the 404 error report in the webmaster tools account and that's what I am intending to to. I was redirecting all 404s to homepage for months and it felt like there was something keeping me from going up in rankings let see what happens now!
Thanks

 

[Craxx]

I did the same thing when I removed my forum. I setup a 301 redirect of all of my forum threads to my home page. That way I didn't lose any visitor. It did not affect my ranking in negative way.

 

[vaneetagoswami]

I don't know about the others but in my case I personally believe that facing 404 error is more better than 301 redirects.

 

[1SEO]

When you create a 301 Redirect, you want to make sure the user has a great experience. For example if a page that was a 404 is a specific page about "hockey equipment" and your homepage is about "goalie equipment". This won't be a great experience for the user.

So when redirecting make sure it is the most relevant page on your website.

 

[HostNurse]

A better approach would be to use robots.txt to deindex all of the pages that no longer exist instead of redirecting.

 

[freds86]

freds86

Excellent! I have a new solution from your idea. I often used redirecting method (301 with htaccess) but it's right when some pages we couldn't use redirection then go with robots.txt

 

[1SEO]

1SEO

I have to disagree with this statement. If a page is a 404 and a user lands on this page not found they will bounce right off this page. If the 404 page has any link juice, this will be lost and forgotten without a 301 redirect.