What do I do with an old site when a new one is built?

[smartlinksolutions]

I have a customer that has a PR 4 website with over 3000 pages of content.  He decided to build a brand new website with a new domain and it now has a PR of 2.  Our question is, what do we do with the old site?  Do we migrate all the content over to the new site and do redirects on all the pages?  Do we keep the old site up and put links over to the new site?  He was just planning on shutting it down but that seemed like a complete waste of PR and SEO.  What is his best course of action?  Thanks for your replies.

[S.Online]

Hi.  I am not a developer, so I can't give you an in-depth answer except to say that you absolutely must implement 301 redirects from your old pages to new in order to maintain your link equity from the old site. If you need more information on how to do this, let me know and I can get the required info.

[NakulGoyal]

Move whatever content makes sense and do 301 redirects. If there's no reason for that content to be there and if it's not bringing in any traffic, or if it is, either wya, it makes complete sense to move/migrate content that's relevant and then do 301's. Make sure you check where most of your backlinks are coming from and if you can get any of those links changed to the new website. I would also check for deep links to the old site and make sure, whatever URL those deep links were going to, are redirected to the new page on the new site. I hope this helps.

[BullionTradingLLC]

I agree 100% with your answer, checking  where most of your backlinks are coming from is very important and changing them to your new website shouldn't be a problem; as well as do look at the deep links and redirect them to the new website as well.

[Unity]

You should also set up Google Webmaster Tools for your old and new domains and then tell Google about your change of address. Log-in then go to Configuration>Change of Address

And here is some other information from Google that is useful to follow https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105