Question posted in 
I have taken over an old domain and put a new site on it, it use to be a membership site so I have thousands of old URLs that now go to a 404 page.
Should I redirect these to the homepage to keep the link juice, it is a relative subject, so the links are useful.
If so how would I do it? This is a wordpress site.
/user/*
/image//
What is the best way to deal with these 404’s?
2
Answers
I would redirect them to your homepage. Google (and all other crawlers) will notice the change, so you can provide a better and continuous user experience for your users.
There is a brilliant plugin called Redirection (https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/) that will allow you to configure redirects in WP, including logs of 404’s that visitors to your site experience to help you know where redirects might be necessary.
A word of caution: there are some major implications to putting redirects in place including effects on your site’s SEO. I recommend you read up on the different kinds of redirects and what they do.
Reading on the topic: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Redirections