I have three website and would have two of them point to the third one. One has been around for about 5 years and ranks well with Yahoo and MSN but not Google. The name is out business name so it is something that is good for word of mouth traffic but not descriptive of what we do. This is our primary website. The second one is about two years old and ranks somewhat OK. This one has some duplicate content of the first website. The third is brand new and has a good name that has out keywords in them. My thoughts are to put all the content on the third webpage and have the other two redirect to it. What is the best way to do this to keep the existing trafic I am getting and get the third webpage to the top of Google as fast as possible.
do 301 redirects which will tell the search engines that that page has permanently moved to the new site. You risk loosing traffic for a little while until all the SE's figure out what you did...but than you should be back up in no time without much inbound link loss.
So will the search engines give my new site the same credability as the one I am redirecting to it? What if I redirect two different sites to it? Do I remove all content on the old sites that I am redirecting? What is the best way to do a 301 redirect?
OK, I am going to put all of my content on the new page and remove all content from the other two sites and redirect them to the new site. Someone tell me if this is not the right thing to do.