Removing important section of website, safely

[McTaggart]

Hi Mozzers,

It's been requested that a top level page on a website I'm working on should be removed.

It concerns me firstly because there are some nice links coming into that page.

I'm also worried because website director has suggested the menu option for that page should simply be removed from all navigation, so you can't find the 'removed' page via his website, but it remains as an indexed page passing linkjuice to website. Is that a risky approach from an SEO perspective?

What's the best approach to this?

Thanks in advance! Luke

[wojkwasi]

1. Make sure that the old URL is at least 301 redirected to a "current" URL to pass on the link juice
2. Next, see if you can contact all the external link sources that point to the old page & ask them to update to point to a different page (if possible)