404 pages are the best way to lower search engine rankings and scare visitors away from your site. In many cases the content is still available on the site only the location changed. Tridion eliminates the number of broken links within your website if your content editors make correct use of component linking. Component linking makes it very easy (and tempting) to change the location of content within a website.
Unfortunately inbound links and search engine content is not managed out of the box by Tridion which results in the dreaded 404 pages being served to visitors and crawlers. The solution is simple: Redirect (301) the crawlers and visitors to the new location of the content yourself. To do this you need to:
