New URL + Consolidating 3 Newly Designed Sites Into One

[rekem]

Currently I have three personal trainer sites for three different locations, and I hear I am getting hit with the duplicate content penalty. So, as the sites were getting long in the tooth anyway, I have made a newly redesigned site using wordpress to host all three in subfolders. It is currently in a password protected directory of one of my sites. I intend to host them in a new domain that I purchased several years ago in anticipation of this. So I basically have this now:

trainersite1.com
trainersite2.com
trainersite3.com

After I switch I'll have:
newsite.com/trainersite1
newsite.com/trainersite2
newsite.com/trainersite3

My questions are as follows:
1) For SEO purposes I need a 301 redirect on the old sites. Would I be able to accomplish this by downgrading all 3 trainersites to IRMs? Would each of my 3 downgraded trainersites still have accessible htaccess files to accomplish this?

2) As the sites are completely redesigned, they don't match perfectly to the new ones. For instance trainersite1.com/contact will reside at newsite.com/#contact because I used a one page theme. Plus the content and design are entirely different. Is this an issue for SEO?

Thanks in advance.

[Bob]

These questions were also submitted to the Service Desk which we also replied to.

Basically in answer to the IRM question regarding .htaccess, yes each IRM could have it's own .htaccess.

You would want to take this Knowledgebase Article into account..
http://Service.FutureQuest.net/kba432

As far as the SEO aspects that would be a question for those that specialize in SEO, which may be one of the most complicated and confused subjects regarding web sites.

Seems to me that for every question regarding SEO there is a minimum of two completely contradictory answers...

-Bob

[rekem]

My new site is working fine, but I'm having A LOT of problems with the 301 redirects from my old sites (IRMs) to the new site and I'm wondering now if what I'm trying to do is even possible. My old sites are now IRMs in my new site that I'm trying to redirect to. So...

trainersite1.com is now an IRM at newsite.com/irm1/

I'm trying to 301 redirect trainersite1.com via an .htaccess file in /irm1/ to newsite.com/trainersite1/ (301 Redirect / h**p://newsite.com/trainersite1/)

Instead Firefox is redirecting to h**p://newsite.com/trainersite1/irm1/ No matter how I write the redirect it inserts the irm folder in the url. Meanwhile Chrome just gives me a 500 Internal Server error. Been at this for hours. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[Bob]

If you have a .htaccess in your /www with a redirect it possibly could be interfering with your IRM redirects.

You may want to try this.
http://Service.FutureQuest.net/kba432

-Bob

[rekem]

As per the link provided earlier by you above I used RedirectControl Off in the .htaccess file in the IRM directory to prevent that. Interestingly, it seems that if I attempt the redirect in the /www directory it may work as intended. At least, one did. I will try more and report back.

[rekem]

It appears that Firefox might have been the issue here. I cleared the cache and the redirect worked properly. It was already working in IE & Chrome. Only thing is I'm still unable to keep the IRM folder names our of the redirects when I try to do it through the .htaccess in the IRM directory, although doing it through the .htaccess in the /www directory seems to be a viable workaround.