Effects of forwarding content to another site?

[CPollock]

Our e-commerce store is moving away from a set of products.

Instead of just redirecting these to an another section of our site, we were considering redirecting them to another site that sells the product.

I don't mind losing that traffic, but I don't want it to inadvertently hurt our other product lines.

Any thoughts on the impact of 301 redirecting a certain section of traffic to another domain?   Anything I should we on the lookout for or consider?

[EGOL]

Any time you  transfer part of a site you transfer away the strength of that portion of your site.  Your page count will drop, there will be some drop in visitor engagement and the number of inbound links and linking root domains will drop.  I would be prepared to see negative impact on existing rankings.

[CPollock]

One of my concerns is that I'm transferring the content to a site that we don't own.  Essentially a previous competitor.  I want to make sure that even though we are transferring the content related to these particular products that it would negatively impact the things I'm not transferring.

I realize there are no absolutes on things like this, but I'm trying to get a general field of where the pitfalls would be and make sure that I'm thinking it through thoroughly.

Now that you have a bit more information, anything else you might warn me about?

[Brandon. 0]

To reinforce EGOL's answer, I would keep in mind that the more intact a page's meaning and "experience" that is receiving the redirect, the less authority lost to a point where essentially no authority is lost.

[EGOL]

This is commonly done by people who own multiple retail sites.

If you 301 redirect the pages to a site that is overall much stronger, the rankings of your pages might increase.   If you redirect them to a weaker site, your rankings might fall.

This type of move can also change the strength of the site where they were originally.  If these pages have a lot of external links pointing at them, then the value of those links will move with them to the new site.   If these pages don't have a lot of links and there are a ton of these pages, then they could be like adding noncontributing weight to the site that receives them.

You will also need to do some cleaning on the old site.  All of the internal links that point to these pages will need to be assessed.  Some you might just delete, but there might be some opportunities to link to the site that receives these pages.

And, for customer continuity, you might want to have a posting on the original site that tells customers that you are still selling these products, but that they have been move to another website owned by your company.