Google's John Mueller said it again, if you 301 redirect pages that should 404 to your home page, Google will treat them as soft 404s anyway and thus all you are doing is confusing your end users.

Google's John Mueller said that Google may very well treat pages that no longer let you buy a product, i.e. the product is no longer available, as a soft 404. If you try to redirect that page to your ...

Google’s John Mueller addressed an issue some site owners might run into where expired product pages are reported as soft 404s. This topic came up during a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout ...

If you have a website, the last thing you want is a 404 error page when a page link cannot be found. Not only is it bad for your Google search rankings, but it is ...