301 Redirect Question

[Justinmg77]

Hi all.

I have a client with two existing websites, duplicate sites, but different domains intended for two divisions of their company in seperate geographic areas.

I informed them of the issues of duplicate content.

We are likely going to combine the two sites into one site with multiple divisions represented.

Site A has been around longer and has a pagerank of 2, which site B is newer with a pagerank of 1. They both get some traffic.

Can we create a new domain entirely and 301 redirect both existing websites to this domain without losing traffic? Or would one site's serps take precendence over another?

What if we choose to keep one of the two domains as the primary and 301 the other to the stronger of the two sites?

How can we do this to preserve rankings and traffic and combine history from all domains into one for a strong campaign going forward?

What would you do? Keep seperate domains and optimize for geographic terms for each division or combine into one new domain? or keep the stronger of the two and 301 the weaker site to the stronger site?

[NikkiPatrick]

Google likes sites that have been around for a while so i would use the older site and redirect the newer one. There is always a chance of loosing traffic or rankings when using a 301 redirect but it should remedy itself in short period of time.

Hope that helped