Redirect micro-niche site to bigger niche site?

[BigMiniMan]

I have a micro niche site that performs reasonably well (page 1 at least) for it's main keywords. It is an exact match domain.

To save the ongoing maintenance of a site that gets less than 10 visitors a day, I was thinking of redirecting this micro niche site to a bigger site (a niche site that the micro niche fits into, if that makes sense!)

Would I lose rankings because of the power that the EMD provided?

Would it be better keeping it there for the backlink it provides to the bigger site (although on the same C Class IP)

[LabadieAuto]

I had a site a while back with the same issue.  What I did was take the posts from the smaller site and re-posed them using same post date on the bigger site.  Then I added a rel="canonical" for each of the old domain (smaller traffic site) posts to the new bigger site.  I let the blog sit for a few months and then redirected the entire domain.

[NakulGoyal]

Now that's very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[Dr-Pete]

I like David's approach. I'd just add that you probably will lose some impact of the exact-match domain, but, on the other hand, if you get 10 visitors/day, that page-1 ranking on the micro-niche site really isn't all that valuable. All else being equal, I'm a fan of consolidation these days.

[stephenfishman]

David-

Can you or others expand on the value of using rel="canonical"?  Does this only help blogs?

I have a similiar micro-site I want to move to a larger site in order totake adavnatge of better image handling on the large site.

Thank you

Handcrafter

[Dr-Pete]

You can use rel-canonical on other, non-blog sites. It does help to have a one-to-one relationship of pages between the two sites.

In theory, the 301-redirect is the better long-term approach, but in practice, rel-canonical seems faster and a bit more powerful in the short-term. So, David's basically saying to use rel-canonical for that initial boost and then do 301-redirects later to make it all permanent. It is a more technically complex approach.