Forum Moderators: phranque
My discussion point is how to go about moving the traffic, content and quality links coming into the sites to direct to a brand new site which encompasses the entire network.
Be sure to setup 301 redirects from the old domains to the new. Not just from the old pages to the new homepage, but carefully setup redirects which point every old page to its new unique location. Failing to do so might severly damage your incomming pagerank from deeplinks from other sites.
Some people install a 301 redirect which simply points to the homepage of the new site for every old URL. Do not do this! Besides the problem with pagerank from old incomming deeplinks, many visitors simply don't like it and will leave. If visitors searched a search engine and thought they found a very interesting page, but instead are redirected to some general homepage of a site, do you think they will try to dig your new site to find the wanted info? No, they just hit the back button and try the next entry in the SERPs.
Do this for one or two of your old sites and wait. Carefully watch the SERPs how much time it takes for the new site to take over the previous positions, and also carefully watch user statistics and income genereted by the new domain. If it fails, you just burned a few of your 27 sites. If it succeeds, your setup works and you can safely move the other sites to the new central site.
