What do I do with 404 URLs?

Hey, guys!

I just ran a site audit for a domain that I had sitting around because it'll be due for renewal soon and I need to decide whether I'll keep it or let it expire. And I was going to let it expire, but for some weird-ass reason one of the long tail keywords (the domain is currently an autoblog with just one affiliate banner as header, and about 50 pages of ArticleForge type of auto-generated content that don't even have images, they're just a wall of text and that's all, the site has no header, no sidebar, not even legal or contact / about us pages, nothing. It's just a wall of text with the same affiliate banner instead of the header and for some weird reason one of those garbage pages had been sitting to #4 in google for months now, so I decided to renew it for 1 more year to see if I can make use of those rankings somehow)...

So anyway, because of that useless keyword (but mostly because the domain has some decent DA) I'm renewing it for 1 more year to see how it performs, but in order for it to perform I need to fix all of the technical issues that it has. And some of those issues are several 404 URLs which I have no idea what to do about. Can you recommend something?

Normally, I'd 301 them to relevant pages, but I'll keep this site as a content site / blog and apparently this domain had been used in the past as a service / education type of site and sold some software, because my audit tool detected URLs like:

domain.com/use-cases
domain.com/pricing
domain.com/product

So, I have no idea what to 301 these URLs to because, as a blog, I'll have no need for such URLs. So, what do I do with this type of URLs? Also, does it matter whether I 301 them via a free WP plugin, or via cPanel? Or maybe I should use .htaccess ?? I don't know...

I would 301 to the home page.

I use .htaccess for 301 but it doesn’t matter if you use a plug-in.

Zombie Pop said:

I would 301 to the home page.

I use .htaccess for 301 but it doesn’t matter if you use a plug-in.

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I think I'll use the plugin then.... Thanks!

home is where the heart is lol. i also feed it to home

tazarbm said:

domain.com/use-cases
domain.com/pricing
domain.com/product

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If those old urls have existing backlinks to them then you definitely want to 301 them to keep the juice flowing. If there really aren't any slightly relevant pages to redirect to then as ZP said the home page is best.

Don't 301 those. Write some content and place it under those 404's just to get a 200 reply with some stuff in it.

Steptoe said:

If those old urls have existing backlinks to them then you definitely want to 301 them to keep the juice flowing. If there really aren't any slightly relevant pages to redirect to then as ZP said the home page is best.

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oops, I forgot to check them for backlinks. Good call

bartosimpsonio said:

Don't 301 those. Write some content and place it under those 404's just to get a 200 reply with some stuff in it.

Click to expand...

yeah, I thought about it