Negative effect on google SEO with 301's?

[JeanYates]

Cleaning up the website by consolidating pages - each with a little bit of useful info -  into one definitive page that is really useful and full of good content.

Doing 301's from the many old pages to the one new really good one. Didn't want to do rel canonicals because I don't want the old pages around, I want to get rid of them.

Will google see the 301s and go nuts or see that there is one definitive, really good page with no duplicate content? The change is very good from a user perspective.

Also, On-Page Report Cards on SEOMoz suggests that you put a rel canonical on a page to itself to tell google that this page is the definitive page. What do you think?

Thanks so much for anyone who has time to answer - so many gurus - this is a great forum. - jean

[RobertFisher]

Here is the issue as I see it: how many pages are you "consolidating" and why? First, if you are using a 301, IMO you are saying I have links on this page and link juice I do not want to lose. I want to move that link juice to my new page of similar type content. If you have 5 pages as an example that you are "consolidating" and three have one link that is the same to each page, then I would take one of the three for the 301 to the new page. On the other two, if one has no links, I would not redirect it unless there was some navigational reason. If the last page had 12 links, etc. then it absolutely gets 301'd. 
It is likely that even 25 pages to one would not be an issue. The question is, is there a reason to redirect? If you are trying to redirect 50 pages for example and they are similar and all have different links, I would do the redirects slowly, maybe 3 to 5 per week for 10 weeks or more. The reason is I would not want it to take a chance an unnecessary flag is raised.
Yes, every page needs a rel=canon.

Gurus, shmurus, have you seen the friggin' Oracles!!! Last year the final was gurus 32 oracles 33 (but it was an OT loss for the gurus - gotta love their heart!)

[JeanYates]

Thanks for the expert help. Generally there are 2 to 8 pages that I am consolidating - for me it's info about different models of a product - we have reviewed them all on different pages but having all of the info on one page with photos and background info is a lot juicier than a dib and a dab on each page - and is more useful for a reader on our site. There are incoming links to most of the pages from other sites so I don't want people to end up on our 404 page. Thus the 301 strategy. Fascinating about the rel canonical. I didnt know. So I need to put a rel canonical to itself on each page that is the main page for a topic. What if there are pages optimized to similar topics? Like manual juicer and highest rated manual juicer? Will a rel canonical for the page optimized for the keyword "manual juicer" and a rel canonical on the page for "highest rated manual juicer" reduce seo juice if the two pages are on the same site? To me when I hear Oracle I think of the database company. Shows how old I am. Ha. Thanks a lot for your time answering my questions.

[RobertFisher]

Good on 301. On rel=canon, I did not mean to imply "each page to itself." There are various issues that arise in coding pages, making changes to pages, etc. So, here is a classic: to a non coder, www.example.com and www.example.com/ are the same page. To the bots they are two. So by inserting rel=canon for that page you are saying if example.com/ comes up treat it the same as example.com.

For your example, if it were me, manual juicer and highest rated manual juicer are very distinctly different pages. The first could lead to a description of 4 and the second speaks only to one. You have to be careful with this in the SEO because if you get too diffuse in adding modifiers to the keyword (making them long tail for example) you can draw strength from the main keyword page. Sometimes it is good to do, sometimes not....this part is the art of SEO.

BTW........what type of OR wine???? (Nothing like a Willamette Valley Pinot....and, yes, I know how to pronounce Willamette!)