Deleteing old page and passing on link strenth?

[BobAnderson]

We are a printing company and thinking over bringing our products down to 2 - 3 rather than the 10+ we currently have, the pages we will be getting rid of will be pages such as flyers, booklets etc and just concentrating on banners and stickers would you suggest 301ing the pages to the home page or picking pages for them to go to?

Also could we expect a decent raise for the pages we are left with?

Thanks shaun

[GlobeRunner]

Bob, generally speaking it's best to redirect users to the page that's most appropriate. Think of the users and what page they would land on--and be redirected to. If they were looking for an old product page and just redirected to the home page, would that be frustrating for them?

When it comes to an actual search engine ranking lift or boost, you most likely won't see one. You only would just not rank anymore for those products that you used to offer. There still may be a boost if you were to redirect an old product page to another page and there were links pointing to the old product page from external websites. Then, the boost might be passed on to the product page you redirect to.

[BradsDeals]

Do the products you're shuttering have decent backlinks behind them? If not, then you probably won't see a noticeable lift. Even if you do have some good backlinks there, my guess is that any lift would be small at best. I don't say that to discourage you, mind you. Good SEO is a collection of a bunch of little things that all add up to a lot, so don't skip it just because it's small.

Also, Jordan's comments about setting up 301s to the most relevant alternative and doing what's best for the user are spot on.

[zaburann78lo]

An alternative idea is you could create a new page with info on why your current products are better for the intended purpose of the old products. For example...flyers are generally viewed as a waste of materials by Millennials and many others, so instead of producing flyers you now focus on banners (or business cards or whatever you think is a better alternative). So you could redirect your old page about flyers to a new article on the benefits of another product over flyers.

This probably would only work well for some products, certainly others will be a redirect to an already existing page.

[JordanLowry]

If possible you want to redirect the page to its equivalent where applicable. It is considered best practice to not do a blanket redirect to the homepage however if there is no other relevant page then the homepage would work just fine. You want to think about what is best for the user. Moz does a wonderful job explaining redirects in this article.

Also, are you asking about a raise in page rank for the remaining pages ?

[EGOL]

Also could we expect a decent raise for the pages we are left with?

The answer to this depends upon how badly you are currently outgunned.