What passes more value, a contextual link or a 1-to-1 301 redirect?

[Alder]

I have a client who is running a website which just lost a significant amount of rankings and by extension organic traffic in a redesign. Call it newsite.com.

The client also has an older site that will no longer be updated, but has good authority that's built up over time. It even out ranks the current site for some queries. This website has no real value to my client.

We want to try to pass the authority from oldsite.com to newsite.com as efficiently as possible. Each site has pages a good amount of matching pages, ie. oldsite.com/subject1 and newsite.com/subject1

My question is, would it provide more value to put a contextual link on the old page or simply redirect the entire page to the new site?

oldsite.com/subject1 contains a link to newsite.com/subject1

oldsite.com/subject1 301 redirects to newsite.com/subject1

My guess is that the 301 would pass more value, but would like a SEOMoz opinion as well!

Thanks!

[Dan-Petrovic]

My vote goes for 301. It makes more sense.

[KrisRoadruck]

301 is going to be the way to go here. Not only is it going to pass a little more juice but chances are if you have a new site the likelihood that much of the content is identical... well you get where I'm going with this

[itrogers]

John, I think you definitely are right. If you 301 all old pages to their new destinations, search engines will count each link from the old page to the new page. This will help your PR/mR much better than a contextual link.You can then get the benefit from 2 or more links per old page rather than just 1 optimized link.

Also, consider the domain registrant of oldsite.com and newsite.com. If they are the same, then those links won't pass as much value if you place a contextual link on the page