I would let them expire and buy beer with the savings.

Let the competitors spend their time and money on them.

Thank you, Dirk.

I always enjoy getting explicit answers from people who I have grown to trust.

Thanks!

How do you know that "a ton of link exchanges" are responsible for the ranks?   Just because you see 'em doesn't say that they are doing anything.

My reply is....

When we made a couple of pages that had text revealed with a click, those pages were really really big pages, with about 5000 words total.  We just though that it would be easy for the visitor to make a short easy menu with the answers opening with a click.  It was an experiment that I had no intentions of doing other places, because I believe that text behind a click is not seen by lots of people.

So, we tried it.  Long tail traffic that was really valuable disappeared.

So, now, I put all of my text out in the open where everyone can immediately see it.

If I write text (and I write lots of it), I want it to be out there where everybody can see it.  I want them to scroll down the page, see every bit of it, whistle and say "holy smoke".

There is a good example of "table of contents" links in this Moz Blog article by John-Henry Scherck.

https://moz.com/blog/link-prospectors-into-lead-generators

He used bullets and that format is good because his subheadings are long.  Mine are usually short, correspond to keywords and can be separated by pipes.

Contents:  Topic 1  |   Topic 2  |  Topic 3  |  Topic 4

If this was my biz and currentdomain.com is an appropriate domain for selling retail then I would start a brand new wholesale website and give it one link from the "about us" page on currentdomain.com.  Any wholesale pages on current domain would redirect internally to the "about us" page.  This keeps all of the power of currentdomain.com intact and does not divide it up.

It would also be a good idea to plan and announce the move. This can be done by:

1. email and mail to important retail and wholesale clients.

2. before redirecting pages the old domain could include obvious messages to retail and wholesale clients, thanking them for their support,  letting them know about the schedule of the move, and asking them to bookmark the new site.

3. inserts in retail shipments

4. special advertising before the move

5. special advertising and email after the move that gives old customers a nice discount when they make their first purchase on the new website.

You can do that.  No problem.  It will be best for wholesale customers.

My comments are designed to be best for retail rankings.  If my connections to wholesale customers are poor then I would use your method.  If my connections to wholesale customers are strong them I would do what's best for retail rankings.  It is simply a matter of choice.

In my opinion, the author of this type of content should know enough about the industry that he/she can easily identify (or immediately knows)

-- the public misconceptions  (these often will be very interesting to people)

-- what people need to know that they usually don't know (this surprises them and is very sharable)

-- the "hot button" issues (plenty of these about waste and they can go viral)

If the author does not know these types of things about the industry then he/she is the wrong author or he/she needs to do a lot of learning.  There are a lot of topics in this industry that can get venomous.  Lots more that are very touchy.  All of them must be 100% technically correct when there is a lot of misinformation about this topic out there.

I'd talk with the client about this and be prepared to say that I am not the right person for this content job.