Shall I remove pages for deprecated products?

Question

On our company site we have pages for multiple products. Some of the products become "deprecated". These products are of no interest for us because they give no income.

Pages for "deprecated" products attract relatively high number of visitors (more than the half combined). Keywords for "deprecated" and "not-deprecated" products have very-very little in common.

Is it wise (from SEO perspective) to move all the pages for "deprecated" products to other sites?

For us it basically doesn't matter what will happen with "deprecated" products and pages related to them but we of course don't want to affect other products in any negative way.

The whole point of all this is to "tell" search engines that our site is more focused on what will left.

Answer 1

From an SEO standpoint it is not wise to remove pages for deprecated products. Those pages have history and inbound links that give credibility to your website. If you remove those pages and return 404 status, or redirect those pages to your homepage, you will lose any link juice associated with inbound links to those products.

I would suggest leaving the pages up, but putting notice on those pages that the products are no longer available, (maybe no longer supported as well), and putting advertisements for your current products on those pages. If you are getting visitors there, I would view it as a rich opportunity to sell more products to your loyal customers. Maybe they don't even know about the new features available in a new product line.