: Do search engines rank internal redirects negatively? A client is in the late stages (code complete) of a website redesign and unfortunately hasn't implemented 301 redirects to point high traffic

@Gretchen104

You must implement 301 redirects in order to keep your page rank in case your urls have changed.

If you don't do that your rank will disappear forever, and your new urls will start from 0.

You've said your client's website will return http 404 code, that's not good at all, you should avoid it. If your are putting code to handle and fire redirect inside your 404 page, you must take it out from there and put it somewhere else, try to find a place where to execute it before sending 404 code.

From Google Webmaster Tools Help, here:


When to return a 404 status code

When you remove a page from your site, think about whether that
content is moving somewhere else, or whether you no longer plan to
have that type of content on your site.

If you’re moving that content to a new URL, you should 301 redirect
the old URL to the new URL—that way when users come to the old URL
looking for that content, they’ll be automatically redirected to
something relevant to what they were looking for.


From Google Webmaster Tools Help, here:


Soft 404 errors

Usually, when someone requests a page that doesn’t exist, a server
will return a 404 (not found) error. This HTTP response code clearly
tells both browsers and search engines that the page doesn’t exist. As
a result, the content of the page (if any) won’t be crawled or indexed
by search engines.

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