what do i do with expired links in se's?

[beantown]

Forgive me if I do not explain this perfectly but I recently caught a domain and there are extensions of my domain in the search engines and as links in webpages such as:

www.mydomain.com/products
www.mydomain.com/sales
etc

I tried to develop a few of my pages with these same exact extensions. For the ones I do not develop, is there a way to avoid these links being dropped from the search engines? Should I just tell my registrar to send those pages to my homepage? Will this effect their page rank? How do you all normally handle this to maximize hits in the long run? Thanks for your assistance.

[Nameable]

Set up a custom 404 page that redirects to your parking page. That way you capture all traffic to the domain. Also make sure you have a wildcard dns entry *.mydomain.com so that you get any other hostnames they used (like www1.mydomain.com, www2.mydomain.com etc)

[beantown]

Hi,
Thanks for the advice. My web hosting company offers the option of having my 404 page be my homepage or having my own 404 page. Is either one fine?

Originally Posted by Nameable

Set up a custom 404 page that redirects to your parking page. That way you capture all traffic to the domain. Also make sure you have a wildcard dns entry *.mydomain.com so that you get any other hostnames they used (like www1.mydomain.com, www2.mydomain.com etc)

[Nameable]

This really should be in the newbie forum

Thanks for the advice. My web hosting company offers the option of having my 404 page be my homepage or having my own 404 page. Is either one fine?

It depends... what's on your home page? Are you serving up a parking page full of ads? A PPC page? You have to point all that traffic somewhere that makes sense.

If you're trying to make money, go visit howard's site: ppcincome.com and get signed up with a sponsor, then send your traffic there.