Site Interlinking & Subdomains

[fordrespect]

I have a group of four UK based (PR 8) sites let’s say
UKSITE1, UKSITE2, UKSITE3, UKSITE4 and one US based (PR 8) USSITE5 site. The four UK based sites sit on the same Class “C” IP, whilst the US site sits on a separate Class C.

Each site links to each other on every page of the site, as its part of the navigation. It’s within a Vertical sector and naturally there are sub-verticals so it is user intuitive. For example - the Top-level is Finance and within Finance, there are Credit Cards, Loans, and Mortgages etc.

We are planning on removing three of the UK based (PR 8) sites (UKSITE2, UKSITE3, UKSITE4) and scaling the sites down in size considerably and re-branding them as sub-domains under one UK site (the strongest).

Question 1 - is around cross-linking. From what I’ve read, cross-linking between sites within the same Class C carry little weight, therefore would moving to a sub-domain strategy remove/affect any of the weighting?

Question 2 – Should we move the UK sites to sub-domains and 301 redirect the existing sites, and pages will this affect the theming of the main domain. i.e. does the themes of ones subdomains affect the theme of the route domain.

[ljgsites]

Don't do it. Use directories if you are going to inner-link heavily.