301-ing all 404s to homepage?

[built]

Just wondering, this bad or not? Wouldn't this be the best way to keep link juice flowing?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Bad. Matt Cutts explicitly stated that Google picked up on this trick during the PBN explosion.

If you're buying domains and 301ing them to your main domain, this is bad. If you're buying a domain for a PBN and doing this, it's bad too. What you should do is find exactly which posts are carrying the most and best links and recreate those pages on the domain or on the domain you're 301ing to, and individually 301 each page to it's new URL.

If it's nothing like this and just a typical website, you'll want to throw an actual 404 response. You don't want to end up getting penalized for Page Rank Sculpting.

What you can do is design your 404 page to try to push users into your site even if they didn't find what they wanted. Show your most popular posts, clickbait stuff, offer them a "free ebook" for their troubles (and email addresses) etc.

 

[built]

Bad. Matt Cutts explicitly stated that Google picked up on this trick during the PBN explosion.

If you're buying domains and 301ing them to your main domain, this is bad. If you're buying a domain for a PBN and doing this, it's bad too. What you should do is find exactly which posts are carrying the most and best links and recreate those pages on the domain or on the domain you're 301ing to, and individually 301 each page to it's new URL.

If it's nothing like this and just a typical website, you'll want to throw an actual 404 response. You don't want to end up getting penalized for Page Rank Sculpting.

What you can do is design your 404 page to try to push users into your site even if they didn't find what they wanted. Show your most popular posts, clickbait stuff, offer them a "free ebook" for their troubles (and email addresses) etc.

Thanks for the tips. It's a little confusing though, so if you 301 a domain to your site you would want to recreate the relevant pages and just leave the others to hit a 404 response?

Atleast that's what I understood from it.

I remember reading in one of the crash course posts about when you acquire a competitors site and then 301 to yours. That's basically what I'm doing

 

[Ryuzaki]

I spoke at length about this in my main case study. Or I at least mentioned that I'm doing it. I've acquired 3 sites and merged them into my own now.

Homepage to Homepage without a doubt.

You can also do contact / privacy policy, etc. No harm in 301ing those, especially if they have links.

The first thing I do is check out all of the content and copy and paste what I want to keep, save all the images, and get the URLs organized. I then port those into my main site with the proper formatting to match what I'm already doing. I try to keep the original publish dates as well, etc.

Then I 301 all of the old URLs to the new ones, one at a time.

You can also look to see which posts have a ton of links and social shares, but that you aren't interested in posting on your site. You can find the most related page possible and 301 it there, change a page to become related, create a new page to be related that you would be okay with posting, or just flat out 301 it to a page you want to rank. One, two, three... a small amount of these manipulations aren't going to get you in trouble. Doing all 404's will catch up to you eventually, whether that's an outright penalty or Google wiping all of the juice from the record and wasting your time.

 

[Golan]

No. No. Just forget about it.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/WsDeu5PUx2A

Barry Schwartz: So I want you to institute another penalty, I want you to call it the 301 to 404 penalty. So SEOs never 404 a page, no matter what, we 301 it to the homepage even if there’s nothing relevant to 301 it to. Now obviously the purpose of the 301 is to redirect a page to a similar page or exact topical page, not that I want to necessarily pass all the link juice from page A to the homepage when that page no longer exists…right?

So can you guys institute a penalty for anyone who 301s a page that should be 404'd?

John Mueller: For us that’s mostly a technical problem in that we see a 301 to the homepage instead of a 404, then that’s something that would make it harder for us to pick up on site changes for example so if we see that the site is using this kind of a redirect instead of a 404 page then it makes a lot harder for us to know which urls to stop crawling so we just crawl these pages like normal pages, follow the 301…then we think well, its like senseless behavior.

So what happens there is our algorithms try to catch that and treat it as a soft 404, and essentially internally we treat it as just like a 404 page. So if you’re 301’ing your pages to your homepage instead of showing a 404 page, we’ll try to recognize that as a soft 404 and internally treat that the same as if it were just a 404 page.

Barry Schwartz: That means the links wouldn’t pass?

John Mueller: Exactly, yeah.

Barry Schwartz: So when you make it an official penalty, can you name it the Barry penalty?

John Mueller: It’s not a penalty, its just something we do for technical reasons, when we recognize it should be a 404 page but instead it’s a 301 page or a 200, then we treat it as a soft 404, and internally we’ll just assume it’s the same as a 404.