Hi, I'm redesigning one of my sites and dropping some of the pages and adding some new ones. The sad thing is that the pages I'm dropping have pr and I hate to give that up. If I just create my new pages over the pr'd pages, the content wont make sense to the url but the question is - does it really matter? It's not what I'd choose to do in a perfect world but it would be nice to keep the pr'd pages. Advice? Lisa
It will only matter if u wannt to sell links on those pages...otherwise create new page after a period of time they too will attain the same PR...
Unless you have links specifically pointing to the pages that you are getting rid of, just junk them. If you have links pointing to those pages I would suggest either a re-use or a redirect. When a page is no longer linked to from your website it will lose its PR and that same PR will be distributed elsewhere within your site. So dropping old pages you will end up loosing nothing. However, you will have to wait for an update (possibly two) to see that PR redistribute.
301 old pages to new pages that have similar content. The ones that don't have new matches you could always 301 to a sitemap page. If the site is big I use a script (sorry, in-house) that quickly does a linkdomain:domain.tld -domain.tld search in Yahoo! and crawls the pages that appear as results to determine which actual pages they link to. After finding that out it's easy to figure out which pages are even necessary to redirect.
Thanks all, I did a combo, added related content to existing pages so it didn't seem weird and 301 redirected the rest. I appreciate the advice. Lisa