Googleon and Googleoff tags are commands for the Google Search Appliance

I would have to agree with Damien and Thomas.  Local SEO is an excellent integration with your national SEO campaigns.  And as Thomas said, don't change your site to focus on local.

What we decided to do was a process for each deletion along with setting up a 301 redirect for any missing or incorrect bio to our Bio's home page.

First, we will remove the bio from the XML sitemap and resubmit the sitemaps.

Second, we wait a couple of days then delete the actual bio page from our site.

So far this seems to be going alright.

I would rather delete the page, but I just hate having Google/Bing seeing 404s for a while.  I would redirect but don't want to duplicate content pages.

What is the best SEO practice for deleting pages?  We have a section in our website with Employee bios, and when the employee leaves we need to remove their page.

How should we do this?

I would have to agree with Damien and Thomas.  Local SEO is an excellent integration with your national SEO campaigns.  And as Thomas said, don't change your site to focus on local.