Merging sites, ensuring traffic doesn't die

[GrumpyCarl]

Wondering if I could get a second opinion on this, please.  I have just taken on a new client, they own about 6 different niched car experience websites (hire an Aston Martin for the day, type thing). All the six sites they have seem to perform reasonably well for the brand of car they deal with, the average DA of the sites is about 24.

The client wishes to move all of these different manufacturers into one site and have sections of the site, they can then also target more generic experience day type keywords.

The obvious way of dealing with this move would be to 301 the old sites to the relevant places on the new site and wait for that to rank. However, looking at the backlinks profile of the niched sites, they seem to have very few backlinks and i feel the reason they are ranking so well for all the individual manufacturers is because they all feature the name in the domain. Not exact match, but the name is there.

If I am thinking right, with the 301 we want to tell Google page x is now page y, index this one instead. Because the new site has a more generic name I don't think it will enjoy any of the domain keyword benefits which are helping the sub sites, and as a result I expect the rankings and traffic to drop (at least in the short term).

Am I reading this correct. Would people use a 301 in this case? The easiest thing to do would be to leave the 6 sub sites up and running on their own domain and launch the new site to run alongside them, however the client doesn't want this.

Thanks,

Carl

[ToughTimesLawyer]

I have had a lot of success using internal landing pages that are targeted to a single topic.  For your client, their homepage might be rentaluxurycar.com that is more general in its content; but then have individual pages that are focused on each make and model, i.e. rentaluxurycar.com/astmonmartindb7, with keywords focused on renting a DB7.

I would also push the client on letting the six subsites run alongside the main site.  If they have different domains and unique content, then they can crowd the search results.