Need some help with 301 redirects [ Please ]

Hey guys, I would highly appreciate to hear your opinion about this.

I recently bought a good auction domain with a decent amount of quality backlinks. The problem is, there was a forum on this domain with a huge number of posts. I'm talking about 2/3 million posts.
I intend to use it for a new money site in the same exact niche but I dont know what to do about the huge number of 404s I will be getting in search console (a lot of them are still indexed).

The question:

1. Do I have to redirect all the old pages (millions) to the homepage ;
2. or redirect only the ones that have backlinks pointing to them (and let the others be 404, again millions of them).

In my position what would you do: 1 or 2 ?

Why don't you try both on a small scale see what works then upscale?

Lande47 said:

Why don't you try both on a small scale see what works then upscale?

Click to expand...

Thank you very much for the suggestion.

I think if I try to redirect a small portion and wait & see, I will end up having all the rest as 404. And I know a lot of dead pages all at once have surely a negative impact. The same as having a huge number of redirects is also a bad thing. This is the Dilemma

But thank you very much for your help.

There are reasons against redirecting everything to the homepage but in your instance I think it is the best solution, mostly because if you have decent backlinks to previous posts on the forum you are replacing people following these links will go to a crappy 404 page. The solution for that would be to build a better 404 page.

So anyway I vote option 1 over option 2.

thedorf said:

There are reasons against redirecting everything to the homepage but in your instance I think it is the best solution, mostly because if you have decent backlinks to previous posts on the forum you are replacing people following these links will go to a crappy 404 page. The solution for that would be to build a better 404 page.

So anyway I vote option 1 over option 2.

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Thank you very much for your help. Your reasoning is logic. Even if it's not perfect I will go by option 1.
I'm only afraid for them to be all treated as soft404 as stated by Google's John Mueller Tweet:

i guess soft404 isn't good for your linkjuice. at least i couldnt find those links in the link report

rebuild the site which get links and interlink those pages properly. a lot of time late the link those pages get will be reported again in gsc.

also a possibility could be a page 301 to another page. (external or internal - i think both could work. you could test it)

redirect to homepage always gives soft404..

Raoul_Duke said:

i guess soft404 isn't good for your linkjuice. at least i couldnt find those links in the link report

rebuild the site which get links and interlink those pages properly. a lot of time late the link those pages get will be reported again in gsc.

also a possibility could be a page 301 to another page. (external or internal - i think both could work. you could test it)

redirect to homepage always gives soft404..

Click to expand...

Thanks a lot Raoul for your detailed answer.
If I have to rebuild those pages which are getting the links, it would be near impossible. There are 800+ of them in a somewhat technical niche, even outsourcing them will cost a lot.
I will try my luck with the waybackmachine and see if I can find some of them.

Again thanks a lot to all of you guys for your suggestions and advices. Always happy to be part of BHW .