Regional sites all 301 redirect to main site?

[omg1]

I have 4 sites on the same product and surrounding information value added material. All are not entirely duplicate and all bring in traffic.

But now in webmaster tools it offers a regional preference.

Should I allocate a good region to each of the sites and redirect all to one?

eg UK, Ger, Aus, all pointing to a USA regional site.

Do the 301 sites get credited with any html pages or now they are useless in ranking and only the main sites gets cached content.

This may place each site high in their SERPs based on the searchers region?

Main question is do 301 sites get credited for pages they direct to and will they rank?

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If you don't know please don't comment. If you have a good idea let me know..

Thanks

[tedster]

Hello omg, and welcome to the forums.

If the server replies with a 301 redirect, then no user agent - neither the spider nor a browser - will ever see any document for the requested url.

In most cases, backlinks that the redirected domain already had before the redirect was put in place will eventually pass their "link juice" on. But trying to promote those newly redirected domain names by acquiring new backlinks for them can be seen as an attempt at manipulation (because, well, that's what it is). The domain that was 301 redirectected will no longer show up in the search results.

So I'm sorry to say that your idea for using Webmaster Tools will not help you, and it may hurt you.