Consolidating two sites into one.

[J_Mac]

I am in the final stages of putting the finishing touches on a website that will replace two that I already have.

The new site will consolidate the online catalogs of the two older sites (both are related sites) simplifying my job and reducing redundancy.

At some point in time I intend to pull the older sites off the net and simply redirect the domains to the new site.

My questions is this.
Should I leave the older sites fully functional until such a time that the new site develops a presence on the net (which could take months and triple my headaches) or should I just leave the home pages of both sites with every link on them redirecting to the new site? Also if doing the latter will this result in any penalties with Yahoo or Google and to which site will the penalty affect... the new one or old ones?

Any help is greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.

[twoline]

If you're really going to pull the old domains off the web, you should set up a 301 (moved permanently) redirect from old domains to new domain. This is the only way to tell googlebot that you're doing a legitimate redirect. Google will then index the new domain, which sounds like that's what you want in the end...

twoline