Combine Contents of Related Sites?

[mfoster7]

Jeremy and/or Sydney, I would like to ask your opinion of the following scenario:

Let's say I have two related tier C websites - for this fictional example, one is about "Baseball Players" and the other "Baseball Trivia"
Both have about 30 fairly good quality articles posted on them
The "Baseball Players" site has a decent number of visitors, clicks, and earnings, while the "Baseball Trivia" site is a bust and can be either retired/eliminated or simply abandoned
Since the "Baseball Trivia" site articles are pretty good quality, it would be a shame to simply let them go to waste and not make use of them
Therefore I would copy the articles from the "Baseball Trivia" site to the "Baseball Players" site either all at once or slowly (perhaps one every couple of days)
If all the articles are copied over all at once, I would do an entire site redirect using the .htaccess file
If the articles are copied over every couple of days, I would do a .htaccess redirect rule at the page level for each
After an appropriate amount of time (perhaps 3 months after completing the copying of all the articles to the "Baseball Players" site), I would delete the "Baseball Trivia" site

Do you think either of the above approaches (i.e. copy all the articles to the one site at the same time or copying one every couple of days) would benefit the remaining site in getting higher PR ranking and/or better SERP positioning on some?

Do you think that either approach would result in the remaining site with the copied articles getting hit by the Google duplicate content filter?

Do you think the benefit of the one-way links currently coming to the site that will eventually be deleted will be completely lost and lose any residual help for the remaining site?

My overall reasoning is simply to try and gain some benefit from existing tier C sites that haven't produced after many months but are related enough in general content to make sense as new content for other sites that are doing well.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.

[Sydney]

Mike, my answer would be to move all of the articles at once and do a 301 redirect. We've done that multiple times because there's really no point in carrying on with a losing site. This is a good reason to have many sites in the same niche so that we can discard losers and spend our energy on winners.

[mfoster7]

Thanks Sydney. That's great. Nice and quick. I was hoping that was the "right" answer. ;)

[Techie]

I agree. I would setup the 301 redirect from the bad site to the good site. Then leave it in place for a few months to let the search engines update their databases. However if you have some good incoming links (to the old domain) and it helps with traffic to the good site I wouldn't delete the old domain but simply let it redirect the incoming links indefinitely.

You may get hit with a duplicate content filter at first but as the search engines visit the old site and see the 301 for the old pages they will update their results and drop the old site.

[mfoster7]

Hi Jeremy. Thanks for your follow up. Your response does address my other questions. I wasn't sure how long to leave up the "bad" site or how long it would take the SE's to "figure out" my shift in data location rather than simply posting duplicate content - and the subsequent loss of incoming links to the old site.

I will probably give this a try today.

So that helps a lot. Thank you.