Using a 301 redirect to pass on EMD love ; advice required (please!)

I have several EMD "niche" sites which are ranking very well & are related. Now I am building an authority site...

My plan is to 301 redirect the EMDs to the relevant areas within the new authority site.

Questions;

1. Is this a good idea?
2. Is the extra "google love" that an EMD has passed on via a 301 redirect or is it "just" the link juice?
3. what happens if the url structure is not the same? eg I plan to copy the EMD articles across, but they will not be in the same relative location
4. any other advice you have for converting my 10 niche sites to 1 authority site

Many Thanks in advance

PS. this is not a discussion/debate as to the power of an EMD; my experience is that they work & ideally I want to keep that advantage if possible

Or...

is it better to keep working on the EMD mini-sites & linking to the "authority site" (the EMDs are PR1 & 0)

So, none will share his/her experience? I'm interested too...

I had the same conundrum recently and in the end felt it was too risky to point to many domains all at one new domain. It can look like you've bought domains and pointed them to another website for just the link benefit.

In the end I created new content for the authority site and used my EMDs to provide links to the main site. This really helped to get the new site ranking for the same keywords and both sites were appearing in the serps on page 1 for the terms we were after. So it's a bit of a double whammy and for me certainly it was the right decision.

We need more opinions!

If you pick either option, bear in mind that if you're using the same places to link to all your mini EMDs that could make your site look like part of a network - like 100 sites all linking to the same 10 sites, which all link to the same top-level site (or which all re-direct there).

If you've built links to your EMDs from different places, then I'd probably stick with linking them to the internal pages on your authority site as a "double whammy" mentioned above, because I'd be scared of losing the EMD benefit.

I would have to agree with what the others said. Pointing the domains at the new authority site doesn't really seem like a good idea to me. I would keep all of the separate EMDs and have links on all of them that point to the authority site.

Just directing the domains to the authority site seems like a waste.

Thanks for sharing

At this point I think I'll probably continue working all the sites (EMD-minis & authority) & add links from the EMD-mini to the inner authority pages!

However...there is a new twist;

Google have dropped one of the EMD-mini sites from the serps (it was my own fault for trying a cloaked redirect). They might remove the ban....they might not....

In this case, if I 301 the "banned" EMD minisite, will the authority site see any benefit?