Will a 301 redirect of a subsection of my site to another domain transfer my position

Does anyone have any experience using a 301 redirect to forward a subsection of one site to another site?

I started a section on my website that has grown too big. It now has 400 unique articles and gets a lot of traffic. The problem is that as a subsection of this website it doesn't carry the clout of a domain dedicated to the subject. So about 6 months ago I bought a website and put up a single page and gave it some incoming links from my other websites and listed it in many directories. It now has a pr5 ranking and ranks about postion 350 for search terms in the title of the index page. It currently has no content on the subject matter in question. My main site has a pr6 ranking, but the subsection I am considering moving has a pr5.

So the question is this. If use a 301 redirect on that whole subsection of my website to this new domain whats going to happen? Will I loose all my great SERPs I have built up?

I would move all the content over so each page would 301 redirect to the exact same page on the new site.

Anyone have experience with similar situations? Recommendations?

Thanks in advance!

 

Small correction: I said there was no content on the new site relating to the subject matter. To be more specific it is a contact page. The search terms appear in the title only.

 

I'd build the content in the new site (even if it's duplicate content) and once the pages in the new site are indexed (to speed up the transfer of the popularity) I'd put the 301 redirect in place. You'll probably see a temporary drop in the positions, but it you do it correctly it might make sense for you in the long term.

 

I hadn't considered that approach. Are you talking from experience, or is this your best guess?

 

Thanks for the input SEO madrid I was going to ask the same question..

 

Well, we put a 301 redirect within the same domain. We applied to different sections. In the first one we first created the new URL and applied the content (duplicate of the old URL) and applied the 301 straight away. The output was that it took ages to get the popularity transferred to the new URLs. Then we made a better research and did the same exercise on the rest of the sections, but in this case we waited until the new URLs were indexed, and the popularity was transferred much quicker, and we had no penalty for duplicate content.

So it was the same situation as yours with the difference of being within the same domain. Therefore, in some extend it's my best guess

 

somehow I wonder if the rules just might be different for dupe content within one domain vs a different domain. Yet I don't know what else can be done. Anyone else had any experience with this?