Guys, Bit of advise on 404's and SEO. I purchased a domain that had recently dropped and as a result I get alot of 404 pages due to the linking of old content. I use Wordpress for my site - what is the best way for me to make use of these 404s? Matt
You can set up scripts to automatically create a page when it doesn't exist but often googlebot et al will ask for pages they know don't exist just to see if that is what you are doing - and you get penalized as a consequence, I reckon.
I have the same experience with one of my site before. I didn't know that it was a dropped domain until I saw it on webmaster tool that it have so so so many crawl/URL errors, 404s. But, the site did pretty well on rankings (#1 on vacuum cleaner reviews) and I didn't do anything about those 404s. Though, it got killed by penguin (April 24), since I used public blog networks back then. But if you're going to use that domain as your private blog network, then you should do something about it to help keep its PR by installing 404 Redirection plugin and revive the previous pages that have high quality backlinks pointing to it (so that webmasters would still keep those links).
If you have the Google Webmaster Tools account activated just go to the Health section , then Errors/Crawling blocked pages section and you can manually set each 404 page to the new desired page. If you have thousands of 404 pages it will be a killer time but in the end it worth.
I simply 301'ed them all to the homepage of the new domain. Not sure what this will do for my pagerank but it brings me alot of traffic.