Deleting old posts - dont want to loose the backlinks

[morpheus83]

Need some SEO advice - I am planning to shift one of my websites which catered to a global audience to a country specific audience. Now that website is pretty old and some of the posts have been linked from high-ranking websites. I dont want to loose out on the backlinks and at the same time I dont want those posts because those stories are irrelevant for my new demographic. I was thinking of redirecting those posts (301) to my new sitemap. Is that a good idea? my aim is to remove the posts and not loose the backlinks for good.

[AussieWebmaster]

you plan on updating the content or dropping it? if updating content or if you have new pages that cover updated versions of the old content I would 301 redirect them to the new page urls - redirecting to the sitemap is not something I would recommend - you would be better off redirecting to the main category page of what the content covers - generally sitemaps are not somethng that you see in rankings so may (not know) not be a page Google would rank over pages with relevant content