Thanks for your input, my only concern is that the people looking for the previous homepage might find it a bit odd, but as you say perhaps a message to let people know about the change might overcome that.

Would be interested if others have had a similar experience or other advice on the best way to proceed.

I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together.

The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page.

My question is:

Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage?

(the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text)

I am in two minds (a & b!)

(a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar

(b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage.

What do you think?

Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)