I have recently updated my website. In fact I have completely rewritten it using wordpress. It was originally constructed using ASP. In the process, I have recycled a a large amount of my original website.
This resulted in a large amount of broken links. Google webmaster tools report more than 30000 broken links and most of them are internal. These mainly result from there being reported links to urls not used anymore. That is links to scrapped, obsolete url from the previous version that does not exist any more.
From SEO perspective I have read that if 404 errors are from internal links, it is best to delete the links. When I click on a broken link from the list displayed at health-> crawl errors, google shows me where this broken link appears at 'linked from' tab. When I click on links from 'linked from' , the purported broken link is not displayed on the 'linked from' page. That is the users of my website has no chance of trying to load this broken link. The broken link still shows up in page source. i.e. when i try view page source from chrome. The broken link is usually used in some javascript
To clafiry, let www.myhomepage/broken_link be the broken link reported by google webmaster tools. The google 'linked from' tab shows that this url was linked from www.myhomepage/some_other_page.
When I view the page source, the broken link is usually in
[script type="text/javascript"]var _bpfbRootUrl="www.myhomepage/broken_link";[/script]
Again, i read that it is advisable to just delete internal broken links, but there are just so many of them and it would be very time consuming to manually delete each and every of them.
What would be the best way to deal with this situation? I would like to avoid using custom 404 page. 302 does not seem like an option either, parsing url using regular expression to not redirect valid pages seem very complicated too
Google webmaster tools report that index on my page had been sharply declining since it was rewritten with wordpress and dropped to 10% of original.
Thank You.