Hi!
I have the following dilemma - in my forum I have installed mod who archived old topics or posts in HTML format while retaining the title, date and time, the author of posts, etc. but no more have connection to the database. My question is the following - how better to deal with Google to request archived topic:
1. whether to return 404 header and wait bots to find the relevant topic in the archives to index it again
2. or to make redirect to archive. He has a map for bots in XML format and HTML map for people who will watch it.

Must be considered that there is no way how to do universal redirect to all specific themes, to use 301 (Moved permanently). In the best case may redirect to the map file, but this return header 302 (found) and I'm not sure whether Google will be interpreted as cloaking.
For the moment I send Error 404 and a message out to people that search is probably in the archives.

Thanks in advance!

The best, if content moved, is of course to http 301 redirect. Even if you actually deleted the old pages (eg there is no way to perform a per case redirection) you should http 301 redirect the most relevant place rather than sending a 404.

Then I don't really see how a 301 redirect to map.php could output a 302 header, could you elaborate a bit on that ?

++

dcz wrote:The best, if content moved, is of course to http 301 redirect. Even if you actually deleted the old pages (eg there is no way to perform a per case redirection) you should http 301 redirect the most relevant place rather than sending a 404.

Then I don't really see how a 301 redirect to map.php could output a 302 header, could you elaborate a bit on that ?

++

Thanks a lot!
When I wait for any answer, I leave removed posts to send error 404 because I have some differences in URLs. Example:
http://wasteland-bg.com/ phpbb2/topicXXXX.html changed to
http:// wasteland-bg.com/ phpbb2/archive/forumXXX/topicXXXX.html
After some time Google removed all my old URLs and scanned all archive URLs as new.
I think this is correct method and doesn't worsen my PR.