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Redirecting a list of 900 links with a 404 status
Posted by on April 24, 2026 at 7:35 amOur SEO partner recently sent us a list of around 900 URLs with a 404 error. In this list, there are numerous URLs that haven't been indexed by Google for months on end and have almost no SEO value. For instance: there are a couple of URLs for old products that have been offline for almost half a year, and even before that, they didn't generate much traffic.
I picked out one URL from this list for a product that had 33 sessions as a landing page and 500 pageviews in one whole year. This is veeeeerry low for a product on our website. While the pageviews can be caused by people navigating our site and the landing page sessions can be from old advertisements or social media posts, I'm kind of hesitant to redirect all these 900 URLs that seem to have little to no SEO value. As I said, a lot of these URLs haven't been indexed by Google for almost half a year, so the SEO value that was once there should be gone by now. Right?
I already asked Gemini to look at this, and it said that redirecting all of these 404s costs way more effort than the possible benefit from a 301 redirect.
Important note: these URLs aren't broken internal links on our current website, but just historical 404 pages (probably pulled from old GSC data).
What do you guys think about this? I don't want to undermine the knowledge of our SEO partner, but to me, this seems like an unnecessary amount of work for pages that generate little to no value.
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1 Reply
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Check those pages if they receive any backlinks from external websites (e.g. with a tool like Majestic).
If there are no (valuable) backlinks to those pages, keeping them 404 should be fine.
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You’re not wrong blindly redirecting 900 low-value URLs is usually busywork. If they’re not indexed, have no backlinks, and barely any traffic, there’s almost nothing to recover. I’d only redirect pages that actually have links or meaningful traffic, and let the rest 404 to 410. Feels like one of those cases where tools Gemini, Runable, other AI SEO workflows surface *everything*, but the real leverage is in filtering what actually matters.
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Don’t you have a tool where you can upload a little of redirects to do it quickly in csv format?
Sounds like you spent some effort double-checking this work than it would have cost just implementing the redirect list.
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Have Claude or ChatGPT do the work for you.
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I wouldn’t go to Gemini for SEO advice.
If the pages have links pointing to them from other websites, they are worth the effort of redirecting. If not, I would probably put them into a 410 status code.
The fact that they were discovered as a 404 and are not part of your internal link structure, points to them likely having links from other websites. Otherwise, how would they have been discovered?
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