Re: Discontinued products / broken links
We have the same problem--on a daily basis.
We removed hundreds of links of items that weren't selling right after the Holidays. Our logs did go down and so did sales--but we really blamed that on the recession not the removal of "dead weight".
First off--just logically, a "clean internet" is a "good internet". Delete the crap!
Our second thought was Google MUST have learned to deal w/this situation long ago. I doubt any of us is getting dinked too heavily for it. In fact, Google is probably happy when dead pages are removed--less CPU for them to index.
You might try setting the meta tags to "nofollow, noindex", setting your sitemap to Archive and then after a month or two, delete the pages if you're really worried.
Regards,
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