Selling expired domains, I get this question a lot. I generally wild card redirect because there's too many backlinks to worry about them individually. However, I'd like to hear from everyone else does. Example, you have a 14 backlinks from Huffington Post, 3 from Forbes, 2 from TheVerge, 10 from Edus, and a bunch of others. They all point to random old pages like: mydomain.com/34234932/2013/05/21/how-to-become-a-better-man mydomain.com/29294224/2012/07/30/why-i-chose-to-become-a-lawyer Everyone has their own preferences. Some will wildcard 301 back to the homepage, some will go back and manually redirect the old links to a new replacement article. What do YOU do? Share your thoughts.
That really depends on what you want to accomplish. Rank a specific keyword/article or just build your website authority ? Usually a 301 of all links to the main page does the trick for increasing authority, but if you want to rank for a specific keyword on page or article than manual redirect all niche related backlinks to that page/article and all rest to the homepage.
Unless you intend to recreate those pages that have links you can either redirect them to the home page or let them go. IMO its not too spammy looking to re-route ALL random non-existant URLs to the main page. However you could also make a generic 404 error type page and link that to the home page then. That also looks fairly natural I think.
