Want to consolidate several domains towards a single site

[brassneck]

I have a number of old domains with bits and pieces of traffic and a little page rank. They are all 'widget' related. Rather than have several small sites, I am going to start developing one bigger site. I want to take advantage of the old domains in some way, so what is the best way to do this from a Google point of view.

Should I put up 1 page sites on all the old domains signposting readers to the new website, or should I set up some kind of automatic forwarding. I'm not too technical so something easy to adopt would be appreciated. I'm worried that the one page solution might look like some kind of link farm activity.

If I go down the forwarding route, can I forward to a specific page on the new site or would it be to the home page only?

Thanks for any help

Stephen.

[edited by: tedster at 6:31 pm (utc) on Nov. 29, 2009]
[edit reason] changed the theme to "widgets" [/edit]

[tedster]

You can easily do this, but don't just employ something your hosting service might offer called "forwarding" - there is no exact technical meaning for that term. What you need to use is a 301 status redirect - and yes, you can redirect to any URL, even an internal page.

I've seen this done when one company buys other companies. They will create a special internal landing page to welcome the customers who are coming from the previous domain. Most of the backlink juice gets sent over to the new page (and then that page can circulate the link juice around the website through its own internal links.

[brassneck]

Thanks - what is the best way to do the 301 then?

Stephen.

[tedster]

The technical details will depend on what server you are using, Apache [webmasterworld.com] or Windows IIS [webmasterworld.com] are the most common.