Best way to transfer pagerank from one site to another

[212areacode]

We currently own two sites (with unique domains) that accomplish a similar goal, but are completely different (so there's no duplicate content, etc) and were developed independently. Both sites have very good pagerank due to great press and inbound links over several years. Also both have thousands of pages and get a lot of inbound deep links.

We plan on shutting one of the sites down so we can focus on the other. We'd like to transfer as much traffic and SEO/pagerank value from the one we're shutting down to the one we're continuing to focus on.

What's the best way to do that? Should we just do a 301 redirect? Or keep the site running in some diminished form and link it to the site we're focusing on?

I saw SEOmoz has a good guide on moving sites http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection which recommends a 301 redirect, but I wanted to see if the same applies when merging sites as we are in this case.

[GoodAtMarketing]

Hi Gregory,

If the goal is to focus on one brand I would 301 the site. However are these sites relevant to each other? Aare the existing links from the transferred site going to help the users?

If these are "yes" then I would do a 301.

Keep in mind having two relevant sites is spreading you ink equity in 2. This is also spreading your credibility/authority on the web in 2.

Also, if one site has a bad link profile I would clean it up before transferring it.

Hope this helps.

[GoodAtMarketing]

To keep a link profile clean the recommended natural looking anchor text are as follows:

50-75% Branded inbound links and URL links.

25-50% Exact and diverse inbound links.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! I'd love to know more about this statement. Can you tell me more about how you derived these numbers, or where you found it? A citation or explanation would be really helpful.

[GoodAtMarketing]

Hi Keri, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization the author  Geoff Kenyon says that he would recommend a 7:3 ratio branded vs. exact..

Do you think this Ratio is good?

<imo>the algorithms are not going to "always" rank a site with a 7:3 ratio over a site with a 6:4 ratio they are not "only" looking at the quality of links and the anchor ratios to rank a site, they are also looking at social media indicators.  </imo>

I did read an article on seomoz about Wikipedia pages which outrank many sites and have mostly exact links.. However, Wikipedia's root domain has mucho trust and authority  so this would not be a good enough indicator