301 to home page - how many 301 would be acceptable

[kellyman]

Hi Guys in the past i had 4 sites pretty much selling the same thing but targeting different keywords.

2 of the 4 sites had a partial penalty

Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole

I have cleaned both up and had penaltys revoked

Basically i want to add all the sites together so i was thing thinking of 301 site A, B, C, to site D and concentrate on making a very authoritative site combined opposing to having 4 sites competing against each
other

Is it bad practice to 301 multiple sites

[lucy24]

Topic header: "301 to home page"
Question in body of post: "Is it bad practice to 301 multiple sites"

That's a huge difference. Are you planning to redirect all requests for the old sites to one site's front page ... or will there be page-for-page redirects from each page on the old site to an equivalent page on the new site?

[phranque]

Are you planning to redirect all requests for the old sites to one site's front page(?)

the reason lucy24 asks this question is that google will see this as a suboptimal solution.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105 [support.google.com]:

Don't do a single redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it's not a good user experience. It's more work, but a page-to-page redirect will help preserve your site's ranking in Google while providing a consistent and transparent experience for your users. If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages on your old site and your new site (recommended), try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Best practices when moving your site:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

[kellyman]

Ah sorry was late last night

Basically I want to remove site A, B, C, and redirect them to D, as i see it as i am doing my bit to clean up my part of the web

All sites have pretty much the same URL structure ans i will be forwarding them with a simple 301 for page to page so all requests go to the relative pages

I was just worried that doing this with 3 sites would cause a problem