Redirect a PR3 to another PR3 - what's the affect on Page Rank?

[newborn]

Hello my main website that is a pretty popular website is a Google PR3. I recently acquired another domain name that is totally unrelated to my major domain.

How will it affect the page rank of my main website if I permanently redirected the domain name I acquired to it. Has anyone done this and what were the results. The domain gets basically 54 visitors per month so its nothing to write home about.

Advice please.

[willybfriendly]

How will it affect the page rank of my main website if I permanently redirected the domain name I acquired to it. Has anyone done this and what were the results. The domain gets basically 54 visitors per month so its nothing to write home about.

Think visitors, not page rank. You would probably get about 54 extra vistors a month.

[newborn]

great willy but will it really affect my page rank in a good or bad way? Im worried as I dont know if google will penalize me for this. Whats the concensus on an issue like this...I mean what would you guys do?

[tedster]

If you do a 301 redirect, PageRank will eventually pass through to the target domain. The result will depend on whether the existing PR3 is a "low PR3" or "high PR3". You might see the toolbar stay at 3 - or it might go to 4 at the next update. Because the page rank scale is roughly logarithmic, it's not likely to go any higher.

[willybfriendly]

3-4 years ago I worried about page rank a lot. Anymore it seems like a distraction. I am seeing PR2 sites outranking PR4-5 sites in my niche.

At the end of the day its about visitors. If you are redirecting for the sole purpose of increasing PR, then I would have to ask "why?" Will it lead to an increase in visitors?

[steveb]

The answer is it will improve your pagerank.