Should I consolidate multiple domains to a single site with 301 redirects?

[dsmdesign]

Our client wants all his sites to be re-designed and perhaps consolidated into one domain. What are the dangers of using 301s on all his already ranking and established domains to their new forward-slash location?

If there are some good articles that describe this exact issue please post a link.

[Chris.Menke]

smdesign,

I can be a good idea to consolidate from different domains to directories if there a business case for it and the overlap between the content isn't extensive.  There may not be an overriding reason to do though--especially if the the domains are fairly mature and have strong back link profiles.  If the decision has been made to do it.  Go through the analytics and the back links, verify which pages to be moved are getting search traffic and which ones have external links and be sure that you're at least 301ing all of them to the new pages on the consolidated site.  The more redirects you place, it's likely the sooner your new pages will get crawled.

Google has published some suggestions on this here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?hl=en and Moz has a good post on dealing with your redirects here:http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection.

[dsmdesign]

Thanks for your comment, It was very helpful.