Consolidating 3 regional domains

[Solas]

We recently took the decision to consolidate 3 domains for .com.au, .eu and .us.

This decision was made before I arrived here and I'm not sure it's the right call. The proposal is to use a brand new .co (not .com isn't available) domain.

The main reason is in terms of trying to build domain strength towards one domain instead or trying to grow 3 domains.  We re-sell stock simlar to hotel rooms (different industry) and our site is heavily search based.

So duplicate content is an issue that we hope improve on with this approach.

One driver was we found for example that our Autralian site was outranking out european site in european searches. We don't want to only hold certain inventory on certain sites either because this doesn't work with our business rules.

Anyway if we are to go about this, what would be the best practise in terms of going about this. Should we suddenly just close one of the domain and to a * 301 redirect or should we redirect each page individually?

Someone has proposed using robots text to use a phased approach, but to my knowledge this isn't possible with robots.txt, thought a phased individual page 301 using htaccess may be possible?

In terms of SEO is 1 domain generally better that 3?

Is this a good strategy?

What's the best 301 approach?

Any other advice?

Thanks

J

[AlanBleiweiss]

I agree with Daniel.  Page-to-page 301 Redirects are the best way to ensure each page's ranking value is passed along and then maintained with the least amount of loss.

[DanHill]

Redirecting each and every page using a 301 redirect to the most relevant new page is the best way to do it in my opinion.  It's a time consuming process but it is worth doing this rather than a whole domain redirect.