404 error 301 redirects?

Hello Everyone,

Is it bad for SEO to 301 redirect the errors you receive in Google Webmaster Tools? I changed my site recently and the old pages that were indexed are now returning 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools. I've setup 301 redirects to forward to the homepage.

Is that bad practice for SEO? Should I just leave the custom 404 page for Google? It's my understanding that this could possibly cause a duplicate content penalty but I wanted to clarify before removing the 301's.

Thanks!

It is much better if you have an error free site, take some time and try to rectify the errors.

Go through your tools and submit them to be DE-INDEXED. It usually takes 24-72 hours for it to fully happen. Make sure there are no links on your site to them, and they are no longer in your sitemaps.

If you have good juice to a link that's now dead - redirect it or create a page - everything else would be pretty crazy - seo-wise.

Nordajgt said:

Go through your tools and submit them to be DE-INDEXED. It usually takes 24-72 hours for it to fully happen. Make sure there are no links on your site to them, and they are no longer in your sitemaps.

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Hello,

The site that was there before was just a crappy autoblog that wasn't getting any traffic. I mainly used it to build the keywords for the site I was going to start, kinda of a place holder while I was developing the new site.

I did 301's from the 404 pages so Google can see that the 404 were moved. No link juice or anything from the old pages. The site is now a PR4 and I just wanted to make sure 301's wouldn't cause duplicate content problems. How do I de-index from Google? With robots.txt file?

Thanks

You de-index from within webmaster tools.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals