Ranking EMD to 301 for branding is it better to leave it as or 301 it?

[Bryan_Loconto]

We have a client about to enroll with us for SEO. The client has about 50 EMD sites, out of which 9 are ranking. An EMD has [Exact] match anchoring naturally, the sites in question are all EMDs the link profiles show it.

The client wants to 301 the EMDs to a brand page.. We would want to 301, 9 EMD sites to the new site. Here is the thing, if the site domain has an exact match to the anchor text profile, when we 301 the page to www.brand.com/EMD will the link profile matter?

One of the EMDs is on page one spot 2 if we do this change, will Google look at the new brand page (www.brand.com/EMD) as an unnatural link profile?

[Everett]

Generally speaking, I think it's a good idea to move from EMD to a branded domain, especially if you can take the link profile with you. However, I'm not so sure about 301 redirecting 50 of them. Google supposedly treats mass-redirects to the home page as "soft 404s" and they may treat mass redirects to a single /EMD page the same. If you are going to replicate the site on the branded domain and redirect each page to its specific counterpart on the branded domain then you will probably be fine. If the goal is merely to redirect every page on a domain to a single page on another domain you may run into problems because all of that pagerank may not transfer over. Doing that 50 times could even bring on an unnatural link penalty for the branded domain.

If you could share some specifics the community may be able to help you device the best plan of action. Would each EMD redirect to a new directory (ie .com/edm1, .com/emd2) or would they all redirect to a single directory (i.e. .com/EMDs)? Would each page on the EMDs redirect to its specific counterpart on the branded domain, or would the entire EMD redirect to a single page on the branded domain? How many links do each of the EMDs have? Are we talking dozens, hundreds or thousands? What are the quality of those links? Out of the 41 that are NOT ranking well, is there any reason to suspect that they have a link-related penalty?

[Bryan_Loconto]

The EMDs are all geo targeted CityKeyword etc.. They would be placed in new directories, .com/301#1 .com/301#2 with approx 9 domains. However, once this is completed does the link profile including anchors carry through? If so a site that has only a brand name will have a bunch of other anchors added to new pages via 301 and may look unnatural once the domain is different from the majority of anchors. This is our concern...

The anchor link profiles of the pages we want to 301 mostly match the EMDs and the pages are ranking high, we do not want to lose the current rankings.

[Everett]

Hello Bryan,

Every page on the 9 old domains should redirect to the same page on on the new domain (.com/301#1/page1 and .com/301#1/page2) instead of redirecting them all to a single page.

Yes, the anchor text should carry through and it is worth being concerned about. This is a tough choice to make and I'm afraid I can't say for sure what would happen. I will leave this open as a discussion in case some other folks have experienced this exact scenario.

If it were me I would do one domain at a time, leaving a few weeks or months between them just to be sure. I would also make sure the link profiles for the redirecting domains were sparkle-clean.