I have a client who is moving to a one page website design.  So, content from the inner pages is being condensed in to sections on the 'home' page.  There will be a navigation that anchor links to each relevant section.  I am wondering if I should leave the old pages and use rel=canonical to point them to their relevant sections on the new 'home' page rather than 301 them.  Thoughts?

Describe your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer.

I have a client who ranked #3 for a very important and highly competitive keyword phrase.  Using the 'Compare Pages' tool in open site explorer I could see that we were far better optimized than the two websites that were out ranking my client.  Our PA was higher, the MozRank was higher, more internal and external links (and the external are all high quality) more linking C blocks etc.. etc... not just the page but the website, in general, was better optimized. The one thing I did notice was that although we had more internal and external links, our ratio was far heavier to the external side than the ratio of either competitor. So, at a loss of what else to do, I went through the website and beefed up the internal links to the specific page in question.  I didn't over do it, just moved up from about 6% to about 12% (one competitor was at about 20% while the other was about 65%).  Six days later we are number two rather than number three. Coincidence?  Should I beef it up even more?  Has anyone ever come across anything like this? Thank you for your comments in advance.