I want to remove some pages from my site with PR, what should I do with traffic?

[bizzer]

I have a section of a site that I want to remove. It has a main page linked from the nav menu, and a half dozen subpages under that.  The pages get some traffic and have ranks up to PR3, which is what my site's home page is. I'm no longer want to do these pages as they require tremendous upkeep and I'm not interested in keeping them going.

So, I know if I just remove these pages and that's all, I'm going to pay for it somewhere with Google.  What else should I do? I do't really have similar pages to direct them too.

[SEM-Freak]

I'd go for #2

[bizzer]

Good ideas. Thanks.

[StreamlineMetrics]

If you don't have similar pages to redirect to, I would do one of the following -

1. Keep the pages up but add some text that says "This is an archive so some of this content may be outdated" and then possibly link to other authoritative sites which do have updated content. This way your pages will likely still rank well in the search engines and the users will find what they are looking for, either in your archive or on the external sites.

2. Simply 301 redirect these pages to the homepage to preserve any link juice/link equity. You will likely see a drop in organic traffic for any terms these pages are currently receiving but it's a much better option than simply removing the pages and serving 404 errors, which is bad for both search engines and users alike.