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!