You deleted a category and left a crater of 404s

You deleted a category and left a crater of 404s
Seasonal store killed last year's collection categories. Just deleted them. 1,200 products went 404 overnight, every backlink to those categories died, and the internal links pointing in became dead ends scattered across the site.

What I did:
— 301'd dead categories to the closest living parent or replacement
— moved orphaned products to a current category and relinked them
— swept the site for internal links still pointing at the deleted URLs

Deleting a category isn't free — it's a structural amputation. Every URL had inbound links, internal and external. Redirect, don't delete.

Caveat: don't lazy-redirect everything to the homepage — Google reads bulk home-redirects as soft 404s. Map to relevant targets.