My site is about e-commerce. Due to quality problems, we have a class of products have been discontinued. Now I need to delete whole category. But I don't know what should I do next will be better for SEO, especially for Google. I want to redirect it, but I can not find the web page associated with it. This category has many external links. Thank you for your any answers!
You can however not delete the pages but have a notice setup that the customers can look into the other categories.
Just leave that page up and put a message saying why this page is the way it is and redirect them to other categories.
Also when you go offline those pages, some may browse and look for it, try to come up with a customized 404 page containing some links to some of your inner page that would interest them..
If you have to delete whole category, including all pages under that category without any replacement pages. I would recommend you just do redirect from category page to homepage to be safe. This redirect would help prevent your site from has a lot of 404 Error pages. You should not forget to update the sitemap.xml too.
We are considering two options: 1. keep the current page, and to guide customers to buy other products in other pages; 2. delete pages, and redirect to parent directory. Which will be better? In the past, we always remove the page and not directly to do any other work which has resulted in many crawl error. Therefore, our website's key words in search engine is very poor