Hello, I recently lost a site due a hardware failure with still over 200.000 pages indexed by the search engines. Since I have to startover the entire site from 0, I'm starting on a new and better domain name. The old domain is 4 years old and does have alot of indexed pages, so I'm guessing it has some value for google, and I don't want all these rankings to go to waste. My question is, what would be best to do with the pages from the old domain (which are currently 404), from an SEO perspective? A simple 301 redirect for every page, to the home of the new URL? Or what would be the most appropriate solution? Regards
yah 301 is the best .... recently i redirect sub domain to new domain and google reindex everything in less then 1 week
If the new site is about the same topic(s) then you should 301 redirect all old URLs currently throwing 404s in Google's WMT to the new URL whose content most closely resembles the old URL's content. This way the link text of the inbound links to the old URL will be applicable to the new URLs content and targeted keyword phrases. You will not only be passing the PR from the old to new URLs, but you will give the appropriate new page credit for the inbound link text as well. As a worse case, last resort you can 301 redirect them all to your new home page. This will at least pass your new home page the PR of the old URLs, but newyour home page won't rank nearly as well for those keyword phrases the old site's URLs ranked for as equivalent new URLs would. So redirecting on a page-by-page basis is preferable.
Try to salvage as many of those pages and redirect them to new pages that have similar content. It would be a shame to waste the age and rank of all those pages.