I have several pages with outdated information on them. Is it better to redirect these pages to the homepage or simply remove the links to them? Should I redirect orphaned pages to my homepage?
Ideally you would would update the pages so that they have up-to-date information on them. If you cannot update the pages then the next best option is to 301 redirect the "orphaned" pages to other pages on your site whose content most closely resemebled the content of the old orphaned pages. However, if no such "equivalent" pages exist then your next best option is to redirect them to your home page. Others might disagree and say you should simply alowl the requests for orphaned pages to return a 404 Not Found error, however I'm too stingy w/ my inbound links. I never let a page 404 if I can help it. Redirecting the pages to your home page will at LEAST pass your home page the Google PageRank that was previously being passed into the orphaned pages so that it could be recirculated around the site.