Hi, I was wondering if it would be better to use 301 permanent redirects to the homepage rather than 401 error pages when someone comes to my site from a broken link. With a 301 redirect I may gain on PR & also if pages become no more on my site then I will still get the PR from that page given to my homepage. I was thinking that maybe this would be a better approach if there is no penality from the search engines from doing this. The reasons being because there is large amounts of broken links that can point to my site, but the amount of broken links that are actually within my own site that link to other pages of my site are minimal, infact there shouldn't be any. So what do you think about this and do you think I should use 301 redirects instead?
Well, I like to have a 404 telling them the link is unavailable and giving them a search box to find what they're looking for and/or secret bonuses for them because I screwed up. The reason I don't like redirecting to homepage is it really makes me feel dumb when someone does that and it leaves me confused when I click a link and am rediirected to a homepage which has nothing about what I want..no doubt, I make it a point to never come back to the website..Just a personal preference for me..but 404 pages are good..(or can be made good )
I would highly recommend implementing a 301 redirect on all broken 404 pages, it is far more beneficial from an SEO perspective.
I don't think you understand what I mean. I will have all broken internal links returning a 404 error page just like normal. But then there are alot of external links / sites that are not owned by me that link to pages of my site that doesn't exist. Now I would prefer to 301 redirect them to the homepage of the best available page rather than just a 404 error page. I feel this will be better to my visitors and also better for SEO, but only if I don't get a penality, which I wouldn't think there would be because that is what the 301 redirect is for in it.
OK! Another question is that if I do 301 redirect all of the broken links on external sites pointing to my site then would it cause a penalty or not as if all these 301 permanent redirects point to the homepage from different urls then wouldn't it looks as if I have duplicate content for each url that points to the homepage and then lower my rankings?