redirecting multiple pages to 1 new page

[pixelhub]

Hi,

I was wondering if there are any positives or negatives of using a 302 redirect on 5 old pages with a page rank of 2, being redirected to 1 new page with the same content as one of the old pages.

hope that makes sense. Just to confuse you more I will attempt a diagram

oldpage1.htm -\
oldpage2.htm --\
oldpage3.htm ---> newpage.html (with the content of oldpage1.htm
oldpage4.htm --/
oldpage5.htm -/

the reason i ask is because our old site has been redesigned and all the urls have changed. we are told by the developer that this is a good thing and our traffic will increase but i'm not so sure. oldpage1 is the sales page and oldpages 2-5 are information pages that other sites link to.

Thanks

[jdMorgan]

If you want the new page's URL to replace the old pages' URLs in the search results, use a 301-Moved Permanently redirect, not a 302-Found redirect. A 302 will cause all of the old URLs to remain in the index, but with the content of the new page, leading to duplicate content problems, and causing those URLs to compete with each other in the SERPs until the search engine just decides to "pick one" -- and likely not the one of your choice.

Jim

[g1smd]

Assuming that the topic of the new page is compatible with that of all of the old pages, then as above, 301 the lot to the new page.

If there is a topic change, then I feel that a 301 isn't always right; in that case a custom 404 error page is usually more appropriate.

If you do a 301 redirect then do make sure that the redirect specifies the full domain name as well as the page name for the target URL.