Best way to set up anchor text on parked pages?

[edu-SEO]

Our company is no longer offering a series of products, much to the disappointment of our SEO team since we've spent a long time building up the pages and getting them ranked organically. The pages all have decent page rank and in some cases rank #1 for the primary keyword. We have a sister company that we acquired a year ago and they still offer these products on their website. They are a completely separate company with their own website which existed long before we acquired them and we have nothing to do with their website.

Our team has proposed that rather than take down the URLs on our site for the products we no longer offer, to put a message saying something like "sorry we don't offer this anymore but you may be interested in this.." and then link to our sister company with anchor text so that they can get some benefit from our SEO efforts if we can't.

The question/issue is how should we do that since there will be a lot of pages from the same domain, about 20 pages, all linking to a few pages on a different domain. Should the anchor text be varied unbranded or branded? On the one hand I think if we change up the anchor text used to link to another page many times from a single domain that looks strange and transparent to google. On the other hand unbranded text would be the better descriptor for users since we are deep linking to the product not the homepage of the other site.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

This is tough. Most of the time, best practices would be to simply 301 redirect the expired pages on your domain to the closest category page those products belonged to.

But in this case, you want to transfer link authority to other, more relevant pages, but those pages happen to be on another site.

If the pages across the 2 sites are duplicate, or very-near duplicate, one option would be to put cross domain canonical tags on your site to point to the correct pages on the sister site.

Another option would be to add the "sorry.... look here" links you mentioned.

The problem with both these methods is they don't address the primary problem, which is there is no reason for the pages on your own site to exist anymore. For example, you really don't want your visitors spending any time on these pages because they offer nothing of value.

So if it were me, I would probably 301 redirect them to the most correct page... on the sister site. Yes, sometimes weird things happen when you 301 a bunch of pages to another domain, but as long as both the backlink profile is clean and the new pages are similar in theme and topic content, then you should be fine. This is what the 301 was intended for and in most cases it works well.

This should hopefully transfer a good amount of link equity to the sister site pages (keep in mind, the ability to pass value does depend on how similar the pages are. I like to keep everything as close as possible - title tag, content, etc)

In the off chance that something goes wrong, and rankings actually drop on the sister site, simply pull the 301s and file a reconsideration request, explaining what happened.

Other SEOs may recommend a different approach, but I'm comfortable suggesting this method. Hope this helps! Best of luck. Let us know how things turn out.