Can Too Many 404 Errors (with customised 404 page) Hurt Rankings

Hi,

I have around 300 post wordpress affliate blog in 10 categories. Each post is an affiliate product review. Lets say every 7 days 50 affiliate product disappears.

So I delete these 50 posts (since there is no product) .... so internal links (link from the site) to these posts doesn't appears anymore since it is wordpress blog.

These post are still in google index. So visitors can see link in search engine and go to these pages as well as bots (even these pages have small number of external link pointing to them).

So for seo what would be better?
1) Just to make custom 404 error page that is useful for visitors
2) To 301 redirect to category page
3) To 301 redirect to home page

I fear that too many 404 errors will hurt my site rankings, will they?
But i also think that 301 redirect to for example category page will be usefull for visitors as well for google since in case of 301 redirect google bot
will deindex the deleted post and in meantime it will sent them to right category?

What do you think about this?

They might hurt the rankings of that page, but not necessarily your entire site.

But i do not need to rank that page because it will not exist anymore.

Yes, they do hurt your SEO quite a bit.

So should i use 301 redirect instead?

mgtarheels said:

Yes, they do hurt your SEO quite a bit.

Click to expand...

Do you mean they hurt in case the are still links from my site (internal links) pointing to that page. Because as soon as i delete the wordpress post it the link to the post disappears from the whole site.

I think it would. This tells google that you are no longer maintaining the site. Use the .htaccess redirect for 404 pages just like the one on wordpress.