Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301

[LeeAbrahamson]

I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site.

Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc.

We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy.

We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites.

Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow.

Do you think that is the case?

What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like.

Thoughts?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

I see his concern but think it may be unwarranted. If you are going to be getting rid of the microsites, then the 301 redirect would be the way to go to conserve all of the authority you built to them. Unless the microsites were penalized, you should be fine.

Another alternative is to leave the microsites up, copy the content over to your site and set up canonicals pointing to the new location of the content. This would transfer over the authority while keeping the microsites live.

[BruceA]

The SEO was right with the 301 with the knowledge that 301 will not pass 100% rank authority as the original URL. The 301 will drop between 1 and 10%.

Sounds a bit complicated the next bit so to save this complication. Have the info on both sites, but put Canonical tags on the pages with the duplicate data.  This is the preference from Googles perspective.  this tells google that this is duplicate content.  If you intend remove the data from these original locations then rel canonical etc will not be needed.

Google does not want duplicate data, therefore you should for good practice use the canonical or delete the other data from sites

Hope that is of use

Bruce