When doing a major site revamp or taking over an existing site, it’s common to use what’s called a 301 redirect to channel traffic to some other page on your site you want people to go to.
If you had a page about “red rovers” but you no longer offer them, what should you redirect people to? Should you send people to your homepage or generate a custom “404-Not Found” page?
It’s common for people unknowing about the mechanics of SEO to redirect people to the homepage but according to a recent WebMasterWorld forum, this could have disastrous impacts for your standing in the search engines.
Some webmasters feel simply generating a 404 error page is a terrible waste of a good webpage. That may be true but if you redirect to the homepage, your rankings could suffer.
WebMasterWorld manager “Tedster” suggests this – if you have a bunch of URLs that you’re no longer using, look for important backlinks that point to problematic pages and generate appropriate content for the same URL. If you’re unable to create unique content for the defunct URL, create a custom “404-Not Found” page explaining the changes to your site.
We agree with Tedster – whenever we change around a site, we either 301 redirect to a specific page, not to the homepage. If that’s not feasible, we create a custom “404-Not Found.”