Question about redirecting 404's on wordpress

Demize

New member
Jan 10, 2010
42
0
0
Milwaukee, WI
Any downside to 301 redirecting 404's to index?

An example on why someone would want to do this would be if they used something like pingcrawl to get backlinks over a year then wiped their blog but wanted to keep their link juice.

Also, is there a better way of doing this, aside from a 301?