I know this topic has been exhausted over the years in WebmasterWorld but because things change as fast as they do and as this situation is slightly different to others I wanted to put our predicament to the panel.
The site that brings in the majority of business is on an .nl (Dutch) domain and deals with learning languages. At the end of 2007 we purchased a .com English site, previously a rather neglected and dilapidated on-line resource for teachers. The domain was first registered back in ’99 and was parked for a couple of years before we bought it. I don't know if the name was snapped up or expired prior to our purchase but the home page had a PR4. After we bought the domain we found an orphaned internal page with over 800 links from Universities and educational related websites. This internal page had PR7. We then relaunched the old site with the majority of the old content and 301'd the PR7 URL to the homepage which has held PR6 for 2 years.
Based on misguided advice we regrettably converted the site to an educational resources directory. Over the years we have added about 100 highly regarded educatiolnal sites and exchange 20 or so links with sites that are directly related to our main .nl site.
As we have since realised, driving targeted traffic from this site to main site has proved relatively futile so now I am looking at other ways in which to best promote our main site.
First thought is to redirect the entire site to our main site and pass over the link juice. Second, is to keeping thesite alive and just redirect the page with all the educational related links to the root of our main site.
What are the current rules when it comes to merging sites, or redirecting pages for the benefit of another site? Considering the sites are only related through theme but not through language, backlinks, topic or TLD would this merge put both sites at risk?
What would you do?
Thanks for any feedback.
D
