: Is redirecting to 404 ok for SEO? There was an old website located at http://domain.com. Then it has been replaced by a new website, with a totally new url configuration, leaving old domain,

@Harper822

A soft-404 is a page that contains readable text that describes it as an error page but the actual status code attached to that page is not 404.

For example, creating an HTML file with the contents along the lines of "The resources you are trying to request were not found" and then saving it on the server then accessing it would qualify for a soft-404 because of the words "not found" and because the HTML headers that will return (as with any HTML page) will start with "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" or "HTTP/1.0 200 OK".

If you want to make sure you're making a true 404 error page, use any programming language and force the 404 result code. In PHP, a ridiculously simple page can be done this way:

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found",true);
?>
<!-- insert full HTML here -->


If you have access to curl, use it with the -I option on the full URL to see the returned headers.

So If you must redirect to 404 error, at least redirect to a real 404 error, not a soft one. What's even better than that is to skip the redirection phase and jump straight to the 404 page (or better yet, the page with error 410).

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@Heady270

Once you publish a URL, search engine bots such as Googlebot will request it for all time. I still get requests for URLs retired 15 years ago.

Redirecting to a 404 page isn't significantly worse than showing the 404 page directly. Googlebot and other search engine bots will be able to understand that the page is missing when you redirect to a 404.

You could consider showing a "410 Gone" status page rather than a 404 page. There isn't much difference between the two other than 410 will cause search engines to remove content from their indexes immediately as opposed to getting a grace period of a day for 404 status.

The only thing that you can do that would be better would be to redirect the URL to replacement page. If you have a replacement page, that would get all reputation and links that pointed to the old page to the new page. I wouldn't redirect URLs to your home page (or other central page). Google considers such redirects "soft 404". It treats redirects to the home page the same as if the server returned 404 status.

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