Hey Richard!
Thank you for this information, it’s very helpful! That’s weird to me because I thought I had Ghost configured to redirect any URLs it didn’t recognize to the home page. It clearly isn’t though as I just checked the links you posted.
The thing is that I can’t just do 1:1 redirects for every old post because I didn’t carry many of those posts over when I moved to Medium and then to Ghost as they were either posts I didn’t like anymore or like the Extra Life one, were for events that had long passed. I’m not sure what’s up with the “brain stuff” post as that should be redirecting via my Ghost redirects file.I checked and indeed, the URL you referenced should be redirecting to the new one but it’s applying the date to the front for some reason. I put in a second redirect and now it’s going to the right place. That’s odd. It’s strange though because GSC isn’t showing a lot of failed redirections. It showed some initially, which I manually fixed in my Ghost redirects file and they diminished. So it’s either not counting them all or something else weird is going on. GSC says the only 404 errors in the last 90 days are for ads.txt, which I’ve read doesn’t impact your search ranking.
Also, a Google engineer actually responded to my post I put in their forums and dug into my account on the back end. Though he was limited in what he was allowed to tell me, he did say to my great surprise that a forum I haven’t used in 12 years but that I had linked to my blog in the signature of back when I launched it had backlinked to the site I’m not kidding you, 149,000 times and only 4,000 of those has the nofollow tag applied. None of that appears in my GSC but he said it’s absolutely been happening and could be causing Google to think I’m faking backlinks. I have no idea how or why this site would be doing that but it’s a small forum that I think is still Drupal based so who knows how it’s configured. I recovered my account there and emptied out my signature. I emailed them asking if that removed the signature from prior posts and I also asked to just have my account deleted but they haven’t responded yet. I’m not counting on them doing anything. The engineer did suggest disavowing backlinks from that domain but GSC won’t let me do it because my site is added as a domain property and not a URL property. I’m seeing if I can change that without breaking things.
Is the best practice in this scenario just to redirect any unknown links to the home page or will that also upset Google? If so, I can try to find all my old links and redirect to new posts where I can. However, this post seems to indicate it can be better to let posts with no replacement 404 rather than redirecting all unknown links to the home page.
Thanks again!