21K not found URLs. Need an advice what to do.

Hi everyone!

This is what happened. I had a white label porn tube site since august 2012. As content was updating on the site, the number of links (links on the page) was growing. Two months ago I decided to grow my own site, meaning my own content, design etc., and move away from whitelabels.
This resulted in huge amounts of links that used to point to various content on my site, but that now points nowhere, and ofcourse, the webmaster alarmed me abot that. And because of this huge amount of "not-found errors" (over 21k links) I lost 80% of my google traffic.

Have any of you ever been in this situation? What is the best thing to do to remove those missing links and go up in serp again?

Thanx

Anyone? Anything?

nix.feliks said:

Anyone? Anything?

Click to expand...

Are all of the 404 errors stemming from a common directory? How different is the URL structure of the new version
of your site from the old version?

301 redirects would fix the problem, but 21k of them? Whew...

First, thanx for the answer, wasn't expect anyone will answer after a few days

What do you mean by common directory? For example there's bunch of links with url structure www.something.bla/videos/blablabla, or www.something.bla/actors/blablabla etc. And the structure of the new version is pretty different and because of that and the number of links it's practically impossible to 301 them.

Is there any way to tell google to "erase" or disregard all the links, some easy way of cleaning everything up?

thanx

By the way, if you read carefully the original Matt Cutts? post about Penguin 2.0 (especially the comments), you probably saw that this could be just the beginning:


Request a link removal


Digging up webmaster?s contact information and asking them to remove the links you put to their site (well, most likely) can be a daunting task. Some SEOs outsource it on Fiverr or Odesk. Alternatively, you can use a link management tool that has a built-in email client (for instance, LinkAssistant) to have better control of which person you email about which links.
How to write an effective link removal request?


1. Don?t simply demand the link to be removed (the mistake someone made with Josh Marshal, a popular political blog editor).


2. If it?s a comment link and you are not the person who left the comment, mention it in the email. Because if you are the spammer who put it there in the first place, why would they want to help you?


3. Alternatively, you could mention that Google just penalized Sprint over spam comments.


4. If the linking site does look spammy, you could tell the webmaster you?ll be forced to disavow their links if they don?t remove them, which could actually hurt their site.


Then, if you?re still not able to remove some of the links, don?t wait for the next Penguin refresh ? use the disavow tool (the option coming up next) for the ones you were not able to remove.
Use Google?s link disavow tool


One thing to note right away about Google?s link disavow tool: don?t use it before you try to remove the bad links by other means. I believe many have been doing it, that?s why Google now even has this warning right next to the disavow button.

Let me know any questions.

you can either redirect the not found pages to homepage or you can make a 404 not found custom page this way the user will not return to the search results