redirect an entire site to new domain

[MadeWillis]

We have recently purchased a new domain, which is by far our biggest keyword. We had server issues towards the end of January and the old site went down. Rather than put the old site back up we just set a redirect to the new domain, which we would have done anyways. Every page on the old domain now redirects to the homepage of the new domain. My questions are:

-Will leaving the old site down have any affect on passing PR? or should we temporarily put it back up?

-Should we change the redirect so that each page redirects to the corresponding page on the new site? (i'm assuming so, but need to reinforce the idea with IT) If so, is it too late? It's only been 12-15 days since initial redirect setup and I can still find some of the old URLs ranking in G, but they redirect to the new homepage. Is there a quick process to redirect that many pages? (IT says it will be a lot of work for them which is why all pages redirect to the homepage)

-Could we see any dup content issues by redirecting entire site to a single page, our homepage in this instance? All content remains the same.

Thanks

[tedster]

First, let's assume that you are talking about a 301 redirect - any other kind of redirect can create problems.

- If there is a 301 redirect in place, googlebot will never see the old content whether it's "up" on the server or not. All any user-agent will be served is the redirect.

- It is a better solution to redirect each page to its true "replacement", but if the url scheme has changed and the site is large, I can see how that may not be practical. The domain level redirect can be OK, it's just not the best.

- If you use a 301 redirect, dupe content should not be a problem. Depending on backlinks to the previous domain, you may find that the home page ranks for an inappropriate keyword, because of anchor text in those backlinks. That's one reason why a url-by-url redirect is a better approach.

[MadeWillis]

Thanks tedster. I should have clarified, we did use a 301. As for backlinks and inappropriate keywords rankings, I don't think this will be a problem for us since this is a niche site and all content is very closely related.