Create a link or redirect?

[Mike.Goracke]

We have 60 demo movie pages on our site. We no longer link to these movie pages internally, because they are outdated; however, a lot of our partner companies are still linking to these pages.

Some of these pages will have 10-15 linking root domains and a page authority of 30+... so pretty decent authority.

These pages only include a movie on the pages, no links. I am trying to pass some of the link juice from these pages to other pages on our site.

I am wondering if I should:

A)Include transcripts on these pages, then link back to our current product page or solution pages?

B)Set up redirects from these pages to a product or solution page?

C)Set up a redirect to our homepage?

Any advice?

Thanks,

Mike

[Mike.Goracke]

That does help!

I was leaning towards option A, so that partners continue to link to the videos and users will click on a video and get a video.

I think I read that same article, but just didn't remember the findings. Thank you very much for posting the link.

Mike

[mememax]

Hi Mike, Sorry for my lastest answer it seems I've overlooked an article from last february which states that the value lost in a redirect is the same you lose in a link (here), so about the value both B and A will give you the same seo value (more or less).

The choice will depend on which page will return the best UX. If you think that the user may find valuable the video they're seeing I'll leave that video there and link to product or service related. If you think that the video is really outdated and you'll better get rid of it, so 301 it to the service/product page.

Hope this helps!

[Mike.Goracke]

Thanks for your responses.

To help clarify things, when I say these videos are "outdate" I mean that some of them are 10+ years old... so old in fact that we do not even have GA tracking on these pages, because that was not a thought we had 10+ years ago.

Long story short, (I had a great response, but my browser refreshed and I lost EVERYTHING, so I am taking a second stab at this) as I see it after reading your responses and thinking through things further, I have two options:

A) instead of transcripts (too much time and/or money to get these written and the videos are so old that it probably doesn't make sense to get this done) I could include a small paragraph with a link to the up-to-date product page.

B) redirect to the up-to-date product page.

I want to pass as much link juice as I can from these old video pages to my product page and do not know which method would be preferred as I could include some anchor text if I choose option A (I understand that internal anchor text does not make a huge difference, but I was unable to find anything that said if there is a preference to a page having one link pointing to another page or a straight-up redirect).

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Mike

[mememax]

Going one by one:

C) redirect to a general page like the homepage is somewhat a bad idea because it's seen as soft 404, like you don't know where to point that expired ocntent so you're pointing that to your homepage.

B) redirect from those page to your product page (if they're related) always give some added value but you're avaporating some of your links value due to the redirect. Also users are expecting a video and I don't know how much your bounce may raise after doing that. Having an higher bounce is never recommended this panda days.

A) I think this is the best solution. You're still giving to users the page they requested and to enchance their experience your giving a related product they may consider useful. Transcripting the video is also useful to have that content indexed so the value of your video is added even more in those pages. I woudl like to know how much traffic you're receiving to those pages because you can also achieve more sells only by giving to the users something useful to buy.

[GeorgeDavis]

I would go for option B without a doubt.

[Highland]

I know that when SEOMOZ does Whiteboard Friday they include a verbatim transcript. I think that's a pretty tacit endorsement that transcripts are important to video.I wouldn't redirect them. They sound like popular unique content (or, as it's called in the SEO industry, link bait). Instead, I would do whatever you could to monetize the pages. At the very least, spread the link juice around to other pages. Link key phrases in your transcript. Try to get people to do something on your site other than just watch a video.

SEO = marketing your website