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Hi there, You have kind of answered your own question in my opinion. "The usage is quite different (indoor vs. outdoor)" & "the specific outdoor categories and products don't map logically to specific indoor ones" You only want to be redirecting if the location is useful to the customer. Thinking "i dont want to loose the authority i've built up", whilst a valid chain of thought doesn't mean you should redirect it somewhere for the sake of it I would personally take 1 of 3 approaches Find a suitable replacement line of products from another supplier so you have somewhere valid to sent the customers 404 the pages and accept you no longer offer a service that users searching for this phrase would find useful Write an informative article / piece on the subject, highlighting the possible use of an outdoor version instead of the indoor as a place-holder piece of content or permanent replacement until new content can be sourced. Some may disagree but thats what I would do

Unfortunately, this is an incredibly complex situation (in many cases) with no easy answer. Unlike a penalty or typical Panda update, this sounds more like a signal change favoring one type of site over another (one set of signals over another). I'm not going to say "big brands", because that carries a lot of assumptions and baggage, but there are certainly signals that tend to be correlated with more powerful brands. If Google really just decided to change their preference, there's not a lot to be done. You may have done nothing wrong, per se, and it's hard to fix something that isn't broken. In that case, you've got a few options, SEO-wise: (1) Hunt for greener pastures. You may have to find new, long-tail keywords where the bigger brands aren't playing. This is a big project beyond the scope of Q&A, but there are cases where you do need to go after new targets. (2) Re-evaluate your keywords based on impact/traffic/conversion instead of ranking. It's possible, in some cases, that big brands could dominate the Top 5, but that, for some reason, you're still getting decent CTR on certain keywords. Do that analysis before you give up on these keywords. (3) Hang in there. Sorry, it sounds like lame advice, but these kinds of updates often go back and forth, and you could see Google tweaking the mix over the next few months. In other words, whatever tactical shifts you make, don't completely cut off the pages/tactics that were ranking before (just in case). All of that said, it's often the case that the situation is a bit grayer, and Google has made this shift because of quality issues it saw across a large number of sites. It's hard to speak in generalities, but Panda updates have gradually been harder on certain types of pages, like product categories, because these are often fairly thin (search results, etc.). If all of the smaller players took a similar approach, it's possible you all got devalued at once, and there may be a way to fix that. Unfortunately, that kind of fix is really hard to advise on without at least some sense of the keywords/pages in question. I guess my main point is that it's easy to say "Google gave big brands all the rankings!" and see red, which can make you miss the few things you might have power to change.