Consolidating many external blogs onto main website: canonicals or 301s

[love-seo-goodness]

Hi Everyone,

Presently I have many blogs across a range of domains, each one targeting the client/type of user interested in that product (or service in this case).  I originally set up this strategy to use the content of each blog to create a "link juice farm" (our products are educational courses so have a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT target market depending on the course area), which in turn links to the related page/course on our main site.

My plan is to move all the content from those external blogs into subcategories on my main website blog in order to increase its traffic, authority etc.

Originally, I was going to cut and paste the content, then put in appropriate 301 redirects from the external blogs to the main site.

However, I then thought about copying all the content to my main site, setting it as the canonical version, and leaving all the external blogs intact and running. The idea being, I still get the benefit of all those external links pointing back at my main website.

Which would be the better strategy for me to pursue?

Thanks in advance for your insights, I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out with this question.

[FedeEinhorn]

Based on what you said, you built a private link network, which is strongly forbidden by Google and even if you didn't get caught, you may in the future with that strategy.

If I were you, I would took down all those blogs and move only the good posts to the main one, if you fill your main blog with "crappy" or thin content, you could get that site penalized.

Move only those articles that are worth moving and then take out all those blogs, with no 301s or canonical, just kill them. If you use canonical, they still have links to your main website (link network - forbidden), if you setup 301, then you get hundreds of unnatural links, which again, results in a private link network. and I advise against both.

Hope that helps!

[generalzod]

Whilst I do agree with Federico, it is also possible to 301 those old sites to the new one and enjoy about 85% of the linkjuice they had. There are perfectly legitimate reasons why one might do this - indeed I once closed 4 separate websites and 301'd them to my new site in order as the business we being consolidated. None of this was about building a private link network at the time...that's just how it worked out. Anyway, my new site went from PR0 to PR3 at the next toolbar PR update and has been fine for 3 years+

Just my 2 pence...