Merging 10 niche pages into 1 large page: how to go about it?

[rayvensoft]

Good day,
    I am new to SEOmoz, so please allow me to take this opportunity to introduce myself before jumping into the questions.  I have a small network of sites that focus on language education online.  I have been working on them for about 3 years, and they were starting to do well.  I am sure I made some mistakes along the way with regards to SEO (I paid for article distribution, and directory submission).  I also did link exchanges - mainly with related sites, but some of them were kind of grey .  I stayed away from blackhat entirely. 
  So, like many people I got affected by Google Penguin.  Luckily it was not as bad as many of the people I have heard about.  7 out of my 10 sites, stayed on or near the top for the main keywords.  They did however drop for some of the secondary keywords.  3 of the sites however got hit hard.  Based on this, I have ventured to guess that google is telling me I was doing it about 70% right, and 30% wrong.  Well, live and learn. 
   After April 24th I started to scower the web to find out what happened and to see what to do.  In my readings I noticed that a lot of people were affected, but some where not.  The one thing I found that most of the people who were affected had in commune was that they were on SEOmoz.  So I decided to join.  So now I am here to hopefully learn what I did wrong, and what I need to do right.   I have no problem at all in starting from scratch and putting in the hard work.

Now, as for my question.  As I mentioned, not all of my sites were hit by Penguin.  More of them survived than got killed.  I was hoping to be able to leverage those sites to give the new larger site a kick-start.  Just to give you some metric, all 10 sites have a quality rank of between 40-60 according opensiteexplorer.  The linking is nothing extreme.  The pages have anywhere from 200-1000 links.  Nothing more than that.  So here are the questions.

1) The SEO I did on all 10 sites were very similar.  So I am afraid of just doing a 301 redirect from the 7 other sites in the future google may punish them as well, and as such my main page new page will suffer.  What would you guys recommend.  Instead of a 301, I could just ad a link to the sub pages on the new site.   It would be less effective, but also less risky.   What would you all suggest?

2) If I take the 301 option, what is the general recommendation on how to phase it in.  I am assuming Google would not like it if all 7 pages got redirected on the same day.  That would essentially make the page have 5000 or so links overnight.  What is the general recommendation for these kinds of things.  one 301 a week?  one 301 a month?  The 301's would not be to the homepage, they would each go to a relevant sub-section of the site.

Sorry for the long first post.  My wife tells me I don't know when enough is enough sometimes.     Thanks in advance for any assistance and I am excited to see what I can learn on SEOmoz.

[SlavaRybalka]

Hi Raymond,

try one 301 a week. I don't think you should get penalized. As long as you adhere to Google's rules everything should be fine.

Also make sure you have a diverse and balanced link profile of your main site.

Slava