You stop offering something. A service line gets retired, a product is discontinued, a location closes. There is a landing page for it that took three years to rank, and now it advertises something nobody can buy.
The two instincts are to delete it or to point it at the homepage. Both are usually wrong, and for the same reason: they treat the page as an advertisement when it has become a piece of accumulated search equity.
What are the actual options?
Four, and they are genuinely different decisions rather than degrees of the same one.
| Option | When it fits | What happens to the links | What the visitor gets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keep and rewrite | The page ranks for demand you can still serve another way | Held, on the same URL | An honest page about what you do now |
| Redirect to the nearest live equivalent | A close replacement exists | Mostly carried to the target | The replacement, without a dead end |
| Keep as a reference page | The topic still gets searched; you no longer sell it | Held | An explanation, plus where to go instead |
| Remove | No demand, no links, nothing to say | Lost | A clean error rather than a lie |
Notice what is missing: a redirect to the homepage. It appears in none of the four because it fits none of the cases.
When should the page stay up and get rewritten?
When the searches that reach it describe a problem you can still solve, even though the specific service is gone.
Search demand attaches to a problem, not to your service menu. A page ranking for "emergency water damage cleanup" is holding a position built on a problem that has not gone away. If you now refer that work out, or handle the preceding step, or handle the aftermath, the page has something true and useful to say — and rewriting it keeps the position while removing the false offer.
This is also the only option that preserves the URL's history intact, because nothing about the address changes. Everything that points at it still points at it, and the on-page SEO work is a content edit rather than a migration.
Ask what problem the page ranks for, not what service it sold. Those are almost never the same thing, and the gap between them is where the decision lives.
When is a redirect the right call, and where should it point?
When a genuine replacement exists, and it should point at that replacement — the most specific live page that serves the same need.
A redirect is a claim that the destination is the successor of the source. Send a discontinued-service page to a service page covering the same problem and the claim is true: a visitor arriving from a search gets something relevant, and the signals accumulated by the old URL apply to a page that deserves them.
Send it to the homepage and the claim is false. The visitor who searched for a specific problem lands somewhere generic, and a redirect to a page with no relationship to the original tends to be treated much like a page that was simply removed. You gave up the URL and got nothing for it.
Redirecting every retired page to the homepage in one batch because it is the fastest thing to configure. It is the option that loses the most and looks the tidiest, which is why it keeps happening.
What happens to the page's authority?
It follows whatever you do with the URL, and it is the reason this decision is worth ten minutes rather than thirty seconds.
A page that has been live for years has page authority built from every link anyone ever pointed at it. Those links are off-page SEO that already happened and cannot be re-earned on demand — a trade publication that cited the page, a supplier directory, a customer's blog post. Deleting the URL discards all of it. Redirecting to a relevant successor carries most of it. Rewriting in place keeps it whole.
Check before you decide. A page with a handful of external links pointing at it is worth keeping alive in some form; a page with none is a much easier call.
When should the page just be removed?
When it has no external links, no search demand, and nothing true to say in a rewrite. Some pages are simply expired inventory.
If you remove it, remove it properly. Take it out of the navigation and out of the internal links that point at it, or you will be left with an orphan page pattern in reverse: menu entries and body links leading to an address that no longer resolves. A clean error page for a genuinely retired URL is a reasonable outcome; a site full of internal links to it is not.
What breaks if you do nothing?
The page keeps ranking and keeps selling something that does not exist, which is the worst of the available outcomes.
Visitors arrive, read a real offer, and contact you about it. Somebody has to explain, every time, that the page is out of date. That conversation costs more than the page earns, and it damages the impression the search result created — a page experience problem that no performance metric will ever surface, because the page loads perfectly and simply lies.
Pull the list of pages for anything you stopped offering in the last two years. For each one, check whether external links point at it and whether it still earns impressions. Those two facts put every page into one of the four rows above, and the ones with links and demand are the ones to handle this week.