Moving content to another url

[Dantes100]

I'm not sure how to handle this task SEO-wise:

The sales letter is on this page: /sales and there are lots of links to it.

I want to move it to /sales2 but at the same time /sales must stay active (with different content), so I can't do a 301 redirect.

Ultimately I want to deindex /sales because I don't want it to be visible anymore.

How do I do this best?

Thanks!

[Andy Langton]

As long as the content is substantially similar, just add a canonical tag on /sales referencing /sales2. This is your only effective option without redirects.

I.e. on /sales:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/sales2">

[Dantes100]

Thank you, that's a great solution.

How long would you say should I keep the /sales page indexed with the canonical tag active before I deindex it? (I don't want that page to be found later on because it's for subscribers only.)

[Andy Langton]

Unfortunately, if you delete the page, you lose the page's value. However, you could presumably redirect it at that time?

[tangor]

In this case I don't think that would matter as the page will be deindexed and (apparently) moved to a subcriber only location. I suspect that area will be blind to bots of any kind.... thus there will be no "value" remaining.

[Shai]

So you want to keep /sales active but not visible through search engines.
/sales has external links pointing at it so you don't want to lose the juice.
/sales2 will become the new location for /sale

Is that right?

If so, why don't you put a noindex, Follow tag on /sale

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

This will remove the page from the search results while maintaining the flow of link juice acquired through the page. (note the FOLLOW is unnecessary as its default but I always put it in for clarity)

You could also then add to the end of the page a link to /sale2 with a short sentence along the lines of "Some old content on this page has now moved to /sales2"

[Dantes100]

Thank you everyone for your help!