Will I lose traffic from Google for re-directing a page?

[RG_SEO]

I’m currently planning to a retire a discontinued product and put a 301 redirect to a related product (although not identical). The thing is, I’m still getting significant traffic from people searching for the old product by name. Would Google send this traffic to the new pages via the re-direct? Is Google likely to display the new page in place of the old page for similar queries or will it serve other content? I’d like to answer this question so that I can decide between the two following approaches:

1)      Retiring the old page immediately and putting a 301 redirect to the new related pages. This will have the advantage of transferring the value of any link signals / referring traffic. Traffic will also land on the new pages directly without having to click through from another page. We would have a dynamic message telling users that the old product had been retired depending on whether they had visited out site before.

2)      Keep the old product pages temporarily so that we don’t lose the traffic from the search engines. We would then change the old pages to advise users that the old product was now retired, but that we have other products that might solve their problems. When this organic traffic decreases over time, then we will proceed with the re-direct as above. I am worried though that the old product pages might outrank the new product pages.

I’d really appreciate some advice with this. I’ve been reading lots of articles, but it seems like there are different opinions on this. I understand that I will lose between 10% - 15% of page rank as per the Matt Cutts video.

[WesleySmits]

Redirecting the old URL with a 301 redirect will send the users to the new URL. All the link juice from links pointing towards the old URL will also be pointed towards your new URL.

Google will keep the old URL in the index for a while, but it will disappear from the search results in a matter of weeks.

One thing to not though, make sure that users searching for the old product end up on a page that is useful for them. If i'm looking for a blue bicycle and i get redirected to a red bicycle page than it might be a related product, but it's not what i'm searching for.

This harms the user experience and will give users a negative association to your brand.
For each product that you retire you should make a decision between

1. Redirecting the page to a different URL
2. Giving them a custom 404 page

By customizing a 404 page you can help users in a tremendous way if done right. Depending on the situation either of these two choices can be the best one.

[MikeRoberts]

Its a question of relevancy and user experience. If i do a search for "blue widgets" and see your blue widget link in the SERP but get taken to orange doodads instead... well, I'll be disappointed and bounce. That page will eventually stop ranking for "blue widget". So when doing a 301 you should make it as relevant as possible. If your blue widget link redirects to red widgets... well, that's closer. I might still bounce but there's a chance I'll stay to look at the widget. If the blue widget page redirected to "Blue Widget 2.0" then that's about as relevant a 301 as you can have. It will likely continue ranking (though the old link in the SERPs will likely swap out for the new one eventually).

Instead of doing redirects, there's always the option to keep the page up with a discontinued message and offer links to similar products on the page. If you don't want people bouncing because they were redirected to something they weren't expecting but really want to enhance the link equity and rankings of a specific page, you could keep "blue widgets" up with a discontinued message to "blue widget 2.0" and add a rel=canonical tag from blue widget to blue widget 2.0 to pass equity. Eventually the new page will swap for the old one in rankings, it will likely lower bounces caused by being shunted to a page you didn't expect, it gives people time to switch any direct links to the new page, and then after a few months you 301 the old page to the new page.

[RG_SEO]

Thanks both - it's interesting that there is no 'standard' method, but it makes sense that this would very much depend on the situation.