I've been working on a project for a large website about netbooks. I already run a small website about one specific netbook but was hoping to absorb this site as the content will be covered again (but not neccesarily duplicated) in a subsection of the larger site. Is it a worthwile excercise to do this using 301 redirects and the change of address function within webmaster tools? I know the change of address function doesn't allow redirecting to anything but the new domain itself so i'm not sure how useful the feature would be in my case. So I couldn't do a change of address on specificnetbook.com to netbooksite.com/specificnetbook for example. I assume 301 redirects from and to specific pages would be more successful, some but not all would have similar matches in terms of content. The smaller site still makes some revenue but has been in decline given the limited lifecycle of these products and as the launch date of the new site is still a few months off i'm not sure how large a consideration this would be come that time. So should I attempt the merge, or leave the smaller website to die slowly? Any advice and your own experiences with this much appreciated.
If the older, smaller site is of good quality and is trustworthy, why would you leave it to die and get nothing from it? It makes no sense. Yes of course you should 301 it. The home page should be 301'ed to the new site's subfolder. If old pages won't exist on the new site, 301 them to the subfolder too. Don't waste the site's credibility. Redirect any would be visitors. As for webmaster tools, I don't think it will have much of an effect, but a quick change there won't hurt.