: Replacing an existing website – SEO considerations for broken links? I have built a new website to replace a client's existing company website on the same URL. The content is entirely different,

@Pope3001725

If you can, it's a better idea to put the redirects from the old urls to their new equivalent. For any other pages that have no new equivalent or are being discarded, you can either leave those to be 404, or redirect those to the home page.

It's also a good idea to have a custom 404 page for the new version of the site that contains a simplified site map, so that visitors can find their way around when they inevitably do hit a 404.

My experience has been that within a week or so, Google reindexes the new content and the old Urls drop out of search results pretty quickly.

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@Heady270

From Google's perspective, redirecting URLs to the home page isn't much different than having them return a 404 status. When a URL redirect to the home page, Google calls it "soft 404" error.

If you completely replace a site, Google will likely stop sending any traffic to the site for a while and the site will have to start over as far many trust metrics go. It would be advantageous to keep as much content from the old site as possible. Otherwise, Google might just assume that the site was thrown away and is now under new, less reputable, ownership.

There should be some pages that are common between the two sites. For example, most company sites have a "contact us" page. You might also have pages on both the old and new sites for things like


privacy policy
about the company
terms of service
business hours


At the very least, use 301 redirects to get visitors from the old URLs to the new in those cases.

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