Deleted page now backlinks are "401 Dead". What to do?

Hi,

I've got a problem in my Google Webmaster tools and its showing me that I have 6 or 7 links that don't go anywhere.

See, what I did was I changed the pages that these articles linked to, and also some posts in online forums.

So now when someone reads my article or see’s my posts and clicks on the link, the link goes nowhere. It only takes them to a 401 page.

Since I have deleted those original pages what is the best thing for me to do to get those links working again. I have to keep Google happy!

I can’t ask everybody who has blogs or websites that have used my articles to going changed the back link to a new location.

What should I do?

I'm thinking that what I should do is to make these pages up again, and then do a 301 redirect to the newer pages on the articles that I want to show.

 

you can either add a custom widget to your 404 pages or 301 them to the newer pages

 

You don't need to remake the pages to do the 301, just set it up in your .htaccess

Its the permanent redirect so it probably carries the links over for se purposes

 

has someone got the code for the htacces. ? And where abouts in the code does it go?

Peter

 

I had the same problem but lucky for me I was using wordpress and I found the link juice keeper plugin, It redirects all deleted or non-existing pages to my home page with a 301 redirect automatically.

 

Here is the code from my htaaccess file. This redirects request for /index.php to the html root /

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ / [R=301,L]

Code (markup):

Take that example, then go to the .htaaccess support page at apache.org, here is a link to get you started - http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html

htaaccess can be a pain to work with, so you might have to play around with it.

If you are using wordpress, there is a redirect script like what kiduka mentioned. You can put in the address of the page, and then where you want the person or search engine redirected to. I used it on one of my sites and it worked pretty good.

 

Hey problem solved. I posted the same question on the hostgator forums and got told to try this code in the .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 /mig-welding-basics-3.html http://www.learn-how-to-weld.com/mig-wire-installation.html

And It looks like it has worked.