Good Practices In Deleting Products and or Pages

[extragear]

Hi:

Lets say you have a line of products that become obsolete. For example, the manufacturer goes out of business. The suppliers dont have any more of these items remaining either. Ok, now imagine that you have a few pages specifically designed for those products. In addition you have products set in in Shopsite for them.

Its obvious that you want to: Turn off all your PPC ads, remove these from any feeds associated with them. Now comes the Shopsite side.

What would be the ideal manner for dealing with these pages and products. Assume that Google, Yahoo and MSN have indexed these pages and products.

What comes to mind is removing these from the sitemap, unchecking the include in product feed, unassign from any product pages.

Perhaps then writing a 301 redirect (I've only done this once and it was for another site of ours)

Then waiting a while (how long??) before deleting. Then finally deleting these pages and products.

If anyone would care to comment on this I would appreciate this. Oh yes, one of my concerns is being penalized by Google for just deleting the products and pages without a redirect.

Thanks

Tim