On a live site, let's say there is a page that is really outdated with old information.Is it ok to just delete it? Or do I have to setup an Apache redirect or do a 404 or something special for the web crawlers?
What are best SEO practices when deleting a webpage? What return code should I use?
apache;seo
Make sure your web server returns a 404 for deleted resources.That is enough.From the official Google Web Master Central blog:Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my sites  ranking? A: 404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet  is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it  dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are  aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see  above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer  that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it  returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a soft 404).  Keep in mind that in order for our crawler to see the HTTP response  code of a URL, it has to be able to crawl that URLif the URL is  blocked by your robots.txt file we wont be able to crawl it and see  its response code. The fact that some URLs on your site no longer  exist / return 404s does not affect how your sites other URLs (the  ones that return 200 (Successful)) perform in our search results.