Been struggling with this one for awhile: the best approach to remove about 100 out of 800 aged landing pages of a PR2 domain. They no longer apply to the site's service offering but do get some traffic and are ranked (PR1). I don't want to redirect them to the home page (spammy), don't want to redirect to a single new page (spammy). Should I just remove and let them go to 404 or is there a better option? Trying not to damage the rest of the site but at the same time, the 100 landing pages are driving customers to a service we no longer offer and resulting in wasted time. Side note: I also have some spammy content that I would like to remove, but when I asked that question here a year ago, I was told "rework your content". Different issue than above non-relevant pages but still curious what the response would be.
You could setup a 404 or change the content of each page to indicate to the visitor that the content/service they are looking for is no longer available. You could even suggest another service you offer if you think it might attract some people. Keeping the pages and simply indicating that the content/service is not available would allow you to keep the links and, maybe, even some of the traffic. Of course, if the traffic is completely irrelevant, then it really doesn't matter if you keep it. The links, on the other hand, are worth keeping. As to the spammy content, reworking it is still a good idea if it's relevant to your site and get's traffic. If it get's no traffic, then just redirect it, preferably to something relevant.