I have about 20 active sites, and maintaining them is damn near impossible. I am in the process of making one single "grand" site to include basically all the content from those separate sites. Now I want the traffic from these other sites, but I also want the link. If I was to redirect a link using 403 header, would the PR transfer? If I was to redirect using html or php would PR transfer? Should I just say we have moved and leave a link? Would the link count for the next pr update?
Ifyou 301 everything to one site the PR (and links) will go along with the redirect. It may take some time (1 week - 3 months) for everything to transfer over.
A 301 redirect is the way to go, IMO. I don't think that you'll get all of the 'link juice' from experience, but a 301 redirect is the widely-recommended course of action.
I'm not sure about the traffic, but I have been told numerous times that to maintain the traffic, you have to do a 301 and not just 1 301, but a 301 for each page to the new page that corresponds to it.
While page -> page is needed when moving an entire site more or less intact, it also works to redirect an entire site to a single page. I did this with the site of a client that went out of business - 301'd the whole thing to the home page of a new site. The new site shows the PR and many (most?) of the links from the old site, although ranking is not what it could be since the anchor text is not particularly relevant.
A 301 redirect is the 2nd best option. Create a niche network for links. You would only have to update the network occassionally
Most probably you might have to mention 301 instead of 403. If this is the case then only 301 redirection is the best way to transfer the pr of your old domains to new ones.
Sorry, i meant 301. Someone mentioned creating a link network. So if i made a sinhle page for each of my sites with one or two articles, and link to my new site, would that be better??? Or just 301 everything to the new site? See, i want the traffic of a redirect but i want to help my new site. Also, my new domain has a pr of 3. My domains to be redirected are at 1, 2, 3. Whats the deal with this? What would you predict final result?
You cannot keep your cake and eat it too... You either 1) 301 redirect them to the new site or 2) continue to maintain them and have their links to your main site counted (assuming they are relevant to your main site). You cannot do both. No redirect short of a 301 is going to pass PR and credit for the inbound links to the old URL over to your main site's URL. And if you use a 301, the main site's URL WILL get credit for the inbound links to the old URL, but Google will remove your old URL from their index as a side effect. And if it's not indexed then it's not going to count as a link. If you're going to shutdown the other sites and try to reuse their content on your main site then you should definitely use 301 redirects.