I have a few domains just sitting around with PR. They have a page up and have pages indexed but I just plan to let the domains expire. But I'd rather not waste that PR. So if I do a 301 redirect to send Google to a new project I'm working on that has nothing to do with those old domains how do you think Google will react? Will it matter that the new domain isn't on the same subject? The new domain is about 2+ months old. Anyone with experience doing this?
Any redirect you do will only be temporary unless your incoming links change to your new domain name.
If you do a 301 redirect the PR should pass to your site. However the links won't have too much benefit on your rankings if they are unrelated. You will need to keep renewing the other domains for as long as you want this PR to be passed to your site. Maybe you would be better selling the sites and spending the cash on building links. I expect webmasters will remove your link if it redirects to another place.
You need to decide what is more important to you. If all you want to do is get higher PR to you new site then go ahead and do the 301 redirect. Make sure you do it correctly or it won't work. Here's another post I made about it. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=1906691&postcount=20 If you want to achieve higher ranking and better SEO for your site then don't bother with it. Depending on what subject your old sites are about you could get a couple thousand dollars selling them just for the PR value you have already with the sites.
I said this in another post, but I will say it here also. I would not do a 301 redirect. I'd rather have the natural link pointing to the site I am trying to pass the pr off to. By doing this, not only do you keep the original pr but you can put one outbound link on that page to point to your new site which will help alot. The only reason I say this is because the pr that you get from a 301 redirect is not real page rank so if you tried to pass that page rank off to another site it may not happen. However if you want to keep the current ranking that the site may have then a 301 redirect is the best choice, forget the pr in this case the rankings are more important.
I did one 301 redirect lately with PR4 website, it still did not take any effect, any idea how long it would take?