Old site to new site...

I have one old site that is well ranked in Google but it is time to take it down, (buisness is dead)

I have a new site that is a similar buisness model and many of the keywords are very similar.

Will a 301 redirect from old to new help the new one with rankings as well as not have a dead page since I have hundreds of inbound links to my old site?

If your going for new site will the links you have built be optimised for the old now dead business. In that case what about talking to the place you got a link from and see if you can change it over.

You can then better optimise around the new keywords you are looking to target. Its just a thought. also if new site but new business what benefits do those links have

Hello there - congratulations on the new website. You will have so much work to do I suppose, if you are trying to rank it high on Google.
You didn't mention if you are uploading the new website under the old domain - or it's a brand new domain that you have for the new website.

However, my experience with "Same domain - from old to new website" is that 301 helped the website (and old pages with new URL) maintain the rankings on Google.
Also, the new pages that we've added on the new website were starting to rank pretty high - 2d or 1st page in the SERPs.
[We had some 350 links (low and middle class links without anchor) before the new website was launched]

So, if you have time for link building I would suggest you to contact every website that has a link pointing to your website and ask them if they could just change the link with modified anchor text. (your niche keywords / key phrases)
You can convince them to do so by telling them that the old site will be dead soon and they wouldn't like to link to dead websites.


Otherwise.. 301 could do the job.

Here is an interesting post on 301 redirects that I red not so long ago, I think it will draw you some key points to think about:
btw - it's a post from Sept. 2007 but I guess the rules are the same.

"All three major search engines handle 301 redirects the same, that is to say they ignore the original URL and instead index the destination URL.
For example, beekerfurniture-com uses a 301 redirect to handersonsfurniture-com and Google, MSN and Yahoo all return the result handersonsfurniture-com when searching for “beeker furniture”.
The word beeker doesn’t appear anywhere on the hendersonsfurniture-com site, and a site search in Google shows that only the home page has any relevance for the word. Clicking on the Cached link in the site search results further shows that the word only exists in links pointing to the site, “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: beeker.” Those links Google is referring to are actually pointing to beekerfurniture-com and the 301 redirect is passing along the relevance of the word beeker to hendersonsfurniture-com

301 redirects can be very powerful when you redesign your site and the URLs change, move to a different domain, acquire a new domain, or implement a URL rewrite. In most cases, this is the type of redirect you want to use because you know exactly how the search engines will respond."



Take care,

T

Thank you.

Let me clarify.
The old site & the new site are both live and running they are separate sites.

One sells red art canvas
One sells red art finished paintings

I am no longer selling canvas & am selling paintings But they are both red and art.

I am going to contact several people who have linked to me and ask them to change the text links but it will be impossible to ask everyone. My old site have been an authority on it's own subject for a while and people I don't even know are linking to me.

What is the best way to guide me through a 301 redirect.

I my experience 301 will do the trick nicely. If the new site is about the same thing your rankings should stay. I have done a simular thing twice. I had a decent traffic trop for a week but after that it went back to the same level, as did the rankings.

Do a 302 for 30 days then switch to a 301. The 302 will give you a temporary traffic boost. The 302 will let the content appear under both domains for the 30 day period.

I got everything all switched over.

Thanks all.