Should I let them run into an 404?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Jim Munro: Hi Tim There is no upper limit for the amount of urls redirected. googlebot will follow your directions. The only exception is if you set up a redirect chain but even then, googlebot can follow your lead for maybe 7 or 8 successive redirections. Redirection is not real-time so allow enough time for testing.
  
  
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  Jim Munro: Sorry, I misread your question. If you want to cover 250 redundant pages to a single URL, you might as well let them 404 because googlebot will eventually treat them that way (soft 404) anyway, once it figures out what`s going on. There`s sometimes a benefit from redirecting pages that have value. so it might be worth considering spend an hour or two that you`ll only have to do once.
  
  
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  Kristine Schachinger: Jim Munro I wouldn`t suggest doing that because if they have any links coming into them then you`ll lose all that link juice (I know everyone hates that word lol)
  
  
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  Richard Hearne: Keep the ones with links... Junk the rest. It`s not an all or nothing situation.
  
  
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  Kristine Schachinger: Your biggest question is what internal link value is coming externally to those pages. Also if you redirect a page to something more general Google may or may not keep the links that are pointed to that page.
  
  
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  Richard Hearne: I`ve had experiences where redirecting didn`t lead to positive outcomes. For 250 pages I think you`d be better to let them decay (404/410). If there are external links you want to maintain you can simply migrate those pages.
  
  
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  Tim Höpfner: Richard Hearne thanks!