So I've decided that I probably need to drastically clean up my sites to get more love from the search engines. Over the years lots of products have been discontinued and I made the mistake of just deleting those pages, removing links to them and doing nothing further. The problem is that it left me with an excess of 404 errors. To try to fix that issue I'm not sure if I should: a) just automatically send all 404 errors to a custom 404 page b) automatically redirect all 404 errors to the homepage c) create dummy files for each missing page with a 301 redirect to my homepage I'm leaning towards the dummy file approach, but wanted some feedback. Also if I proceed with this fix, is it fine if all those dummy redirect files are the exact same content? Or should I make a point of still giving them unique titles and a bit of unique text? Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks.
It depends on your current content and whether you're still getting the bots attempting to access those pages. Normally what I'd do if the bots are active but the pages are not indexed is just contact the site owners and ask them to change the link, then send a proper 404 for the old pages. If they are indexed and the bots are attempting to access them, then I'd likely go for the dummy page or the 301 redirect.
if you do a 301 redirect, then setting up dummy pages for each 404 page with content would not add much value as they will be redirecting anyways. just a title and a few words of text would do just fine. i would not use the same content over an dover on all the dummy pages. you can also do a custom 404 page and hit the visitors with some affiliate link/banner or CPA offers but that would depend on what kind of site it is. try to find out how many 404 pages you have and what kind of traffic you get to those pages. then do the math of redirecting vs monetizing to see which one makes more sense.