Sorry if SO is not suitable for this, but there are 700 more other SEO issues.
I am a senior developer of a travel site with 12k + pages. We completely redesigned the site and resumed work in January, and with the variable nature of the journey, there are many pages that are no longer on the site. Examples:
/destinations/africa/senegal.aspx
/destinations/africa/features.aspx
Of course, we have 404 pages in place (and this is a complex 404 page, not a 30x redirect to 404).
Our SEO adviser asked us to redirect 304 pages to all 404 pages (as shown in Webmaster Tools), and his argument is that 404 hurts our pager. He would like us to redirect our Senegal and display the pages above on the Africa page (which does not contain the content previously found in Senegal.aspx or features.aspx).
The equivalent for SO will take the URL for the deleted question and redirect it to / questions, rather than displaying 404 "Question / page not found."
My argument is that since these pages are no longer on the site, 404 is the correct status for the return. I also argue that redirecting these links to less relevant pages could damage our SEO (possibly due to duplication of content)? It is also a very time-consuming redirection of all 404 when our site accepts some content from our own system, which adds / removes content as it sees fit.
Thanks for any advice
Adam
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