How to deal with Pages not present anymore in the site

[Dreamrealemedia]

Hi,

we need to cut out from the catalog some destinations for our tour operator, so basically we need to deal with destination pages and tour pages not present anymore on the site.

What do you think is the best approach to deal with this pages to not loose ranking?

Do you think is a good approach to redirect with 301's these pages to the home page or to the general catalog page or do you suggest another approach?

tx for your help!

[TimHolmes]

Hi there, I think this is a mixed question about meeting the needs of SEO and your customers. You could naturally allow some pages to 404 if you no longer wish to rank for a specific location or as an alternative you could as mentioned above 301 certain pages to a new page of a similar or relevant topic/destination.

Managing a users experience and not having a 404 is probably best, maybe a specialised landing page which keeps the destination is of use... you could use the page to still rank for this destination, but maybe suggest alternatives within the vicinity, this might be useful for hotels on a local level and still lead to conversions. For larger scale alternatives say at a country level this may be more difficult as the user is probably already set to visit a specific destination, as such a 301 to a higher level category maybe more appropriate unless you want to clarify to the user that this location is no longer available.

If you still wish to rank for these old pages/destinations, it is probably best to keep them in place or redirect to a similar page.

Hope that is ok.

[Alick300]

completely agreed with Tim.

[seoman10]

I wouldn't divert them to the homepage, the content has to be relevant.  As Tim says keep them or redirect/create a page that does have relevant content.  
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[Dreamrealemedia]

Tx Tim for the answer, it make sense.

I explain you in more details my site structure:

site.com/destinations - hub for all the destinations

site.com/destinations/tanzania - single destination page

site.com/tours/tanzania-tour-1 - single tour page

site.com/travel-category/cultural-tours - a second way tour are organized, for travel category.

So lets say i dont want to sell anymore the destination Tanzania and all his related tours. In the case i want to keep the ranking for the destination and tours i would need to 301 redirect the destination Tanzania to the more general page site.com/destinations and the site.com/tours/tanzania-tour-1 page to site.com/travel-category/cultural-tours since this is a cultural tour.

Does this make sense?