Consolidating Microsites?

[airnwater]

Hello,

I work with a conglomerate of 10 or so different websites.  In the past year or so (but especially in the past few weeks) we've seen a drop in traffic to our smaller microsites and have found that it's time consuming to rank well for these sites.  With the recent changes that Google has made, would you recommend consolidating our sites and focusing our attention on one or two main sites?

Also, if we were to redirect the microsites back to our main site, could that effect the rankings of our main site?  Would the demoted rankings get passed along?

Thank you!

[BKSearch]

I think it is a little early to do a universal 301 redirect of all of those sites to your main site. Some of my sites affected last month have already started to come back. I would try to continue to get them to come back a bit.

You could get some more topical content on them and maybe clean them up a bit.

Then wait.

If that still does not work and you don't want to maintain or track them you could do 301 redirects. I dont think you will pass any penalties. I have done this myself and did not see any ill effect.

It seems that when penalties happen they tend to be to a directory or a domain. The penalty does not seem to get passed along.

Anyone else seen any bad things happen when a 301 redirect was done?