Client moved from an old custom CMS to WordPress in spring and the agency that did it didn’t map old URLs properly. Ahrefs showed around 300 URLs with backlinks returning 404, including some from decent news sites.
I’ve done 301s for about 250 of them to the closest match. For the remaining 50 there’s no real equivalent page anymore.
For those, is it worth emailing the linking sites to update the link, or just redirect to the category and move on? Also curious how long it took for you to see the equity come back after fixing redirects this late.
Redirect first, email second. For the 50 with no equivalent I’d consider rebuilding the page if the link is from something strong, it’s usually cheaper than earning a similar link. Redirecting a deep resource link to a category page is often treated like a soft 404 anyway. In my experience recovery after late fixes took 1-3 months, but it did come back for most of it.
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