https://www.seroundtable.com/301-pages-home-soft-404-22811.html If this is correct, then you can't retain link juice for your PBNs anymore by redirecting all old non-existant URLs to the homepage (404 to 301). So, unless you're reconstructing the old inner URLs, only the backlinks pointing to the PBNs homepage actually count for how strong your money site link will be. We could work around this by instead creating individual 301 redirects to the homepage from the best old URLs.
It should be don't see why not. I think it's just if they see that all your 404s redirect. He actually says in the video that 1 to 1 redirects is the best bet.
Damn. This is bad news but now we have to build all redirect one by one. Just take out all URLs with backlinks and then redirect them to the homepage to pass the link juice.
Calm down, SER just invented some news because there aren't any real news. Honestly, this isn't new at all, it's been like this for years and it's by far not the first time Google officially states this! Don't believe me? Start reading the official webmaster forums, Google employees adressed this topic uncountable times. Can't be generalized, so some of the redirects are usually seen as soft 404, some not. There isn't a pattern, but the more 301s to homepage Google catches up, the higher the percentage treated as soft 404 seems to be.
You guys should have stopped doing this long ago anyways. Majority of the time it looks fake and stupid. Find a couple valuable pages and 301 those ones (if you're not rebuilding those pages).
