Q: GSC is showing a pile of 404s after our migration — how do I clean them up?

Q: GSC is showing a pile of 404s after our migration — how do I clean them up?

This spikes after every migration and it looks scarier than it is. Here's the cleanup, prioritized.

Short answer: triage by value — redirect what matters, let truly dead pages go.

Long answer:
— Export the 'Not found (404)' report from GSC Coverage.
— Cross-reference each 404 against your old crawl and your backlink list.
— Bucket them: had traffic or backlinks (fix), had neither and isn't a real page (leave as 404).
— For the 'fix' bucket, 301 each to the closest matching live page, one-to-one.
— For pages with no good match, a 404 or 410 is the correct, honest answer — don't force everything to the homepage.
— Re-request validation in GSC.

Next step: prioritize the 404s with backlinks first — those are recovering real authority, not just tidying a report.