Merging Sites - consolidation of your my web sites

[Llanero]

I have had 3 tourism web sites for many years (each site represents a different place in Costa Rica) and they cross link with each other. www.monteverdetours.com is the main site -  the most important one.

In order to help ranking and to comply with all the new google changes.... I have recently been advised that (page by page, I should incorporate the other site, www, arenalvolcanotours.com into the monteverde site with 301s,

In other words there will be a new  directory on monteverde called /arenal-volcano-tours which will be the new home page for the arenal section.  So page by page I can map the old URL's to the new URL's  eg arenalvolcanotours.com/arenal-hotels-economy.html
301 redirect to
monteverdetours.com/arenal-volcano-tours/arenal-hotels-economy.html

Now my monteverde site was once penalized by google and I am worried that doing this might have an adverse effect (although the thinking behind doing this change is because google prefers it to all the cross linking and also I will be able to consolidate all the links from Arenal into Monteverde).

I respect the person who made the suggestion but I was interested in opinions from other people! I want to be positive this is a good ideas before undertaking this major work!

Any opinions would be appreciated!

[LCNetwork]

No worries. What I mean by "naked URL" is a link with no anchor text, just the URL.

As in:

http://www.example.com/

as opposed to

examples

[Llanero]

It has taken 2 years of a lot of hard work (bad link removal, better content, social media) to get my site ranking again. It was only the monteverde site that was penalized (not a manual penalty) but it is recovering, thankfully! So I don't think the Arenal site will have an adverse effect in this way.

Ah,, sorry for my ignorance.,., what is a naked URL?? Non-follow?

[LCNetwork]

Obviously, there is no 100% right answer.

Google's bias toward brands and larger, more powerful websites appears to only be getting stronger. Having one strong domain can often be of greater benefit than having two, weaker domains. I have personally had success with merging pages and domains to consolidate authority and link equity. If the primary site is the one that converts and brings in money, you could strengthen it in the way you suggested.

On the other hand, it can (sometimes) be easier to build links to a domain that is focused around one subject rather than a subpage. Depending on how you are working on your linkbuilding efforts, this could factor into your decision. Additionally, If the secondary domain is performing well, you might want to let sleeping dogs lie and potentially focus more of your efforts on promoting that site. This is a business decision only you can make.

Is your primary site still penalized? Do you have reason to think the secondary site is at risk for a penalty? The mere act of merging domains carries no risk of penalties that i know of (anyone is free to correct me here), but there is the potential for one site to "infect" the other. [Side note: you may want a few more naked URL anchors pointing at your sites, especially arenalvolcanotours.com.]

All in all, if someone you trust conducted a thorough audit and this was his/her advice, I would consider it.