I've just gone through my sites 404 list and redirected all of them to the front page.There were in general 2 categories of links. The first was relative links of client sites which we may have hosted (we are a web development company), which somehow have ended up relative to our URL. The second were links which were very general, most likely used by spam bots to register on the site (we have blocked all anonymous registration).My questions is: Should I not have done this? If any of these are spam style links from another site, will redirecting them to my front page actually harm my SEO ranking? How do other users deal with a list of 404 errors?
Consequence of redirecting ALL 404s on a site
redirects;301 redirect;links;404
Redirecting 404s to the front page is considered bad because users will not be receiving the content they expect. The team at Google have said many times that a website that reports a 404 to a user is not bad, 404's are perfectly normal.You should only 301 a 404 when you have something ideal in its place... For example: Page about Cats /cats 404 > 301 to /felines is validPage about Cars /cars 404 > 301 to /dogs is not validPage about Bikes /bikes 404 > 301 to / is not valid if the front page is not all about bikes.So to stay on the good side of Google do not try to retain PR / Backlinks gained from pages that no longer exist if you do not have relevant pages to fulfill there place. To read more about my claims you should read more about 301 abuse online. 