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I noticed recently that I have a bunch of 404 errors for articles that I deleted years ago on my site well prior to my recent migration. Actually they were short excerpts from a RSS feed. If I knew better then, I would have never deleted them.
I currently have the redirecting to the category they would have belonged too had they still exist. My question, what is the proper protocol for redirecting pages that are not longer published?
My process goes as follows:
1. Use Xenu to do a site crawl and make sure the page is no longer linked to from anywhere on your site. If you don't know anything about Xenu you can read about it a bit on my blog here.
2. 301 redirect the old URL to the new page equivalent or closest category page, if neither exist I just throw it back to the homepage.
There probably are a few extra checks others do, but the above works for me!
Cheers :)
That is pretty much what I did.
These pages are old and I don't link to them on my site. However, I am assuming that they were indexed at some point, which is why Google is now showing a 404 error in my Webmasters Tool account.
Sounds like I did it correctly. Hopefully, Google will agree.
I noticed that the dates that Google found these 404's was the same time my site slipped is ranking for my keywords. Hopefully the site will start climbing again. It was climbing steadily before this.