Advice Needed

Hi,
I have been a lurker on this forum for quite a while but now need to ask some advice from the members.
I have a site that is around 4 years old and has approx 300 000 backlinks, it gets a bit of steady traffic (around 70 uniques per day) the subject of the site I have no interest in now but would like to use this domain for a new project. This new project would involve wiping the site clean and re installing different scripts, my question is:

How do I make sure that the back links out there don't direct to a "page not found" message once I have deleted the original content?

Thanks

301 .htaccess redirect all the pages youre deleting to some kind of.. "temporarily under construction" page.

likeskoolaid said:

301 .htaccess redirect all the pages youre deleting to some kind of.. "temporarily under construction" page.

Click to expand...

thanks likeskoolaid

or just redirect them to the index of the new site you're creating. better idea.

If you use a dynamic error that SEO tunes the keywords based on requested URL you can still rank for those words in the SERPs... If you 301 to the index you lose the keywords but keep the old inbound links which may link to you in the context of those old keywords depending on how you got them.