Sub-pages with more links than homepage - bad?

[rayvensoft]

Hi,
   I am working on merging a number of my niche websites into a larger site (301 redirects, phased in over a few months).  My question/concern is whether google will penalize the main site when it sees that the homepage has almost no links to it, and that about 10-15 sub-pages have a lot of links back to it.

Does anybody have experience with this kind of scenario?  Will it create  a problem?

Theoretically I could spend a year or so building up links to the new main page - building the brand - before doing the 301's.  The smaller pages still bring in clients, but it is getting hard to maintain that many micro sites.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[itrogers]

If you are going to 301 your niche/micro domains over to the main one, make sure you let Google know that you have moved the domain in Webmaster Tools.

Google says to 301 all pages to their new corresponding pages.

If your niche sites were structured like your main site, but those sites were penalized by Google, then you will probably experience the same effect with the 301s. Google won't penalize you simply for the fact that you have more links to deeper pages than your homepage, they'll penalize you because the links you are acquiring are spammy in nature.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Raymond,

Merging a large number of sites can be tricky. If Google sees a large number of new 301s all pointing to your homepage, this could throw up some flags. This is especially the case if the homepage in question doesn't already have a strong link profile.

That said, there's no guarantees that it will hurt, either.

I'd go slow and try to build up natural links to your homepage outside the 301 redirects. If and when you do de-commission a site, make sure it has a clean backlink profile before redirecting, Try to redirect individual pages to individual pages (not everything to the homepage) and itrogers said, make sure to file a change of address in Google Webmaster Tools.

Best of luck!