Do 301's pass link juice?

So I just purchased a site for cheap that is in my niche. This site has good PR and good backlinks but really does not rank for anything worthwhile.

I put a 301 in place to my main site but really have not seen any movement in the SERPs yet. I was under the impression 301's passed PR/IBL's pretty well.

Am I wrong on this point? Is it better to just leave this acquired site up (without a 301) and put a link to my main site?

Thanks.

 

to be VERY Short... NO

 

301 redirects historically have passed PR & backlinks in Goolge.

 

It's probably NOT better if your main site is the one you want to brand and promote as your primary domain in this niche. 301s do pass PR and link value but you need to give the search engines a good amount of time for them to assign the Page Rank and link values to your new domain. 2-3 months would be sufficient.

 

I do believe you're wrong on that one.

 

I'm rather interested in softgroups' reasoning as well

 

I`m trying to figure out softlinks meaning.
Its a bit ambiguous considering alphacooler asked two opposing questions....

 

301 redirects do pass PR and links but if the links are not related to your niche then they won't help as much.

Check your links in MSN to make sure you have got the links pointing to your site. Also check to see that the old site has been removed from google.

 

I can confirm that they do pass on Google. I recently made major changes the the link schema on one of my websites ( full list of changes: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=770227 )

I used an htaccess file to redirect all the old URLs to the new and it took 2 weeks to a month for all of the links and PR to switch to the new pages.

 

Okay but what about with 2 different domains?