Does redirecting old site's URLs to new site's front page hurt a page's ranking?

Posted by Kaivosukeltaja on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Kaivosukeltaja
Published on 2011-09-27T09:41:26Z Indexed on 2011/11/14 2:06 UTC
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redirects

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301-redirect

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page-ranking

An old site that is being rewritten needs to have it's URLs redirected to the new site. There are a few hundred pages that may or may not have corresponding pages on the new site, probably with different slugs, and adding mappings manually will require more hours than we can spare.

It was suggested that all old URLs be redirected to the new front page, but I remember reading somewhere that this confers a penalty in page rank because it's what link farmers do. Is this true or can we take the easy way out?

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