A Cre8asite Forums member noticed that his site is reporting 404 errors when in Google Webmaster Tools. What can he do about it? Is it bad from an SEO standpoint?
First of all, a bit of troubleshooting is recommended. You may want to try Xenu link sleuth to see if it finds any broken links. You may want to see if those pages are on your server and if the links to the pages are correct. It may also be possible that they just weren't accessible when the Googlebot last crawled your site.
However, the member realized that the pages were from an old directory and ended up setting up 301 redirects to the new pages. That works too. In fact, there are two ways to do that as discussed in the thread:
redirect 301 /directory/ http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/
or:
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^domain.com/folder/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/newfolder/$1 [r=301,nc]
Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.
