_:nd51335b9a5544e42bca44190a0871ae5xb3
<http://schema.org/text>
"<p dir=\"auto\">The 301 redirect would be a better option.</p>\n<p dir=\"auto\">I will try to explain why this is better than a 404 page.</p>\n<p dir=\"auto\">1. If people posted a link to the product PageRank to your website.(This is one of the ranking factors in Google) If the page doesn't exist anymore and brings up the 404 page it will lose the value from all the links to that particular product. If you use a 301 redirect to send visitors to a relevant product or to the homepage then the value from those links will have effect on the page where you send them to.</p>\n<p dir=\"auto\">2. Nobody likes a 404 page. There are very cool things you can do with a 404 page so that they are still helpful to the visitor such as most popular pages, a search function and even jokes. But in the end nobody would have clicked on the link or typed in the url to your website and think: Now i want to see his 404 page.</p>\n<p dir=\"auto\">I hope i answered your question. Let me know if anything was unclear.</p>\n"
<https://moz.com/community/q/topic/36334/increase-404-errors-or-301-redirects/7>