Any limits on 301 redirecting sites into mine?

[cattie]

Cleaning up my domain portfolio and closing down varied old sites that aint worth the work to bring back to their glory days. Was wondering if I should just 301 redirect them into one site to boost its domain power. Thoughts? Anyone else 301 redirected many domains into just one? What about off-topic sites?

[Robert Charlton]

Was wondering if I should just 301 redirect them into one site to boost its domain power.

IMO, not a good idea, and I'd strongly suggest you don't try this. If the sites thematically fit together, that may be something else... but you really don't want to randomly combine pages, or to redirect irrelevant pages to one another.

Best practices when moving your site
Google Webmaster Central Blog - April 16, 2008
[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

Don't do a blanket 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. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

[lucy24]

wondering if I should just 301 redirect them into one site

One site or one page?

[Walt Hartwell]

I'm going to disagree with Robert a bit, I think it's perfectly fine to redirect an old domain to a memorial folder on a different domain. The memorial folder page(s) on the new domain should have nav pointing to other pages on the new domain, but the pages on the new domain should not link to the memorial folder page(s).

It's better if they are close in theme, but the memorial page should help bridge the gap.
If the old domains aren't very strong on their own, maybe 301 them in to a blog you can later get some value from.

I'd only do a few at a time, and once 301'd it needs to stay that way, don't bounce them around.