Removing decent PA and PR pages?

[Mike.Goracke]

I currently have some html pages that have camtasia videos demo-ing our products; however, these videos are WAY outdated and we no longer want to maintain them. The are only videos, no text at all is on the page.

The pages have an average page authority of 40 and mR of 4.

Should I just remove these pages or should I create a redirect to the homepage or product page?

Or...?

I have roughly 30 or 40 of these types of pages.

Thanks for any help.

Mike

[NakulGoyal]

Do you have a videos index page ? Do you have other videos that you maintain ? Is there another video you can redirect to ? To me, I think it might make sense to redirect (301) these pages to the videos index page. That makes most sense to me rather then a 404 or a redirect to the homepage if you really do need to delete these videos.

[Mike.Goracke]

We are also getting rid of the video index page. We plan to remove all videos from the site.

[BrianCrouch]

What kind of backlink profile do you have on these pages?

If you have no high-relevance links to speak of, just redirect the pages to the most relevant category or product page. If you have relevant links that pass some value to the domain, build the pages up with fresh content, deprecate the video, and update the meta and sitemap.

[benjaminspak]

Shrugs Why not upload them to You Tube do a 301 to your You tube Videos, and Monetize the videos?

or

Just 301 them to the most relevant pages/articles on the site.

If that's not possible, the home page should be ok since it sounds like your site is well established.

[EGOL]

Should I just remove these pages or should I create a redirect to the homepage or product page?

It's possible that 95% of the visitors to your site are coming in through these videos.    Now, that number is probably too high but... maybe it's only 20% of your traffic but 90% of your new clients.

Best to learn how valuable they are, you might change your mind.... and if you put a transcript on those pages I know you will get LOT more traffic.

[Mike.Goracke]

Here is the entire story:

• we had these videos on our site demo-ing our product
• partners of ours linked to these videos, giving the pages decent page rank
• we removed all links to them from our site once they became obsolete
• some of our partners still link to those video pages

We are planning on creating new, unrelated videos in the future and putting a transcript on those video pages is a stellar idea.

I also just checked Google Analytics and it looks like we are not getting any resonable traffic from the video pages.

Do you think I should redirect these video pages to the applicable content pages or just remove them, forcing our partners to update their sites?

Thanks,

Mike

[Mike.Goracke]

The backlinks are from our partners linking to the videos. Roughly 15 partner links per video and there are roughly 30 videos or so.

The highest ranking page linking to one of those video pages has a PA of 21 and mR of 3.2... so nothing too crazy cool.

That is why I was wondering if I should completely remove the pages, forcing the partners to update their websites to our new and better content. I personally think that from a customer standpoint, if they are on a partner page, then click on a link, expecting to find a video, and instead am redirected to a product page, that is not really what I was wanting to see... you know?

But I don't know the impact of removing 30+ pages that have decent PA and mR from my site?

Thanks,

Mike

[Mike.Goracke]

Eventually we would like to create a YouTube channel or something, but right now, those videos are from like 2007-ish... so they are wicked outdated and provide no relevant content to new or existing customers.

I am starting to think that 301ing them to the product pages may be the best option.

Thanks for the info.

Mike

[BrianCrouch]

Oh, I see, that does make a difference.

What kind of relationship do you have with the partner websites?

I wouldn't remove the pages. Can you archive all of the videos into one page, create a video sitemap, redirect all the existing URLs to that central archive, and then add a Hero video or slideshow at the top encouraging visitors to check out the new content? If you're still getting traffic from customers to those pages, the main thing is conversion and getting them into someplace valuable for them and you.

UPDATE: just read in another comment that you're getting rid of all videos on the site. That's an inhouse decision but I must say if you abandon all of these pages don't sacrifice the link juice, at least redirect the URLs to the homepage.

[Mike.Goracke]

"... the main thing is conversion and getting them into someplace valueable for them and you."

Well played Brian. That is the perfect way to think about it.

Thanks for your help.

Mike

UPDATE: By "getting rid of" I just mean we are not going to link to them internally and that the videos themselves will no longer exist. We plan to either redirect those URLs to either product pages or to pages requesting a demonstration.