I'm working on an old project based on Joomla 1.5. Most of its code was written in core php but it does have SEO URLs. I'm required remove dead links (about 2000 URLs) from the site as it is lowering our organic reach.
When I opened each of them, they showed me the 404 Error page of the site. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with that. After all, that's why we have 404 pages, right? .. to display errors when a link is not found over our server, right?
I tried cleaning up Server's Cache and even purging expired cache after reading some tuts. Now that it doesn't seem to help, I'm not sure what to do! So, any helps? Btw, site is at www.parentune.com and an example dead link is: http://www.parentune.com/parenting-blog/category/Adoption/latest
As I didn't have any new URLs to redirect those old URLs to, but had the list of those reported URLs in an excel file, so what I did is I read the Excel file in an array and matched if $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] was in that array (obviously, all the URLs in that array have to be relative to index page). If the URL was found in the array, I simply redirected the page to homepage.
I also cross checked then on brokenlinkcheck.com and then it didn't report those URLs again as 404 URLs. So, seems like the approach fitted as solution! :D