Purchased new site with good SERP ranks, do I operate and build links or redirect the TLD?

[NickEubanks]

I recently purchased a blog within my product category - it has many first page rankings for difficult keywords within my niche. I am wondering if it makes more sense for for me to continue to operate this blog and build links to my site and blog (blog is in wordpress) or to export the XML feed and upload the content to my blog (new site also in wordpress), at which point I would do a 301 at the Top-Level domain.

Any thoughts, ideas, or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[EGOL]

This is a very complex question.  It depends upon rankings, content, visitors, conversions, links, brand recognition, profits, products and many other things.  Any answer not based upon careful consideration by a smart person who understands SEO and has a deep understanding of your site is not reliable.

[NickEubanks]

Thank you EGOL. This is actually for a friends site who I helped advise on the purchase. Currently the new blog, operating exactly as it had for many years, sending targeted visitors to his site through mentions in the posts.

While this is great as an independent source of qualified traffic, he would really prefer to have the product listings currently indexed with the new blog be located under his TLD instead (for obvious brand and eCommerce reasons)

The new blog's link profile is not nearly as diverse as the main website, but it does consistently generate its own traffic and does a decent job of starting conversations with visitors through comments. The existing blog's brand is NOT that important, to anyone.

Any additional thoughts? (thank you for your time and consideration)

[BrandonShoupe]

I own a small ecommerce site and I've seen where one of my (much) larger competitors have purchased other sites and went the domain-redirect route. According to Open Site Explorer it is helping their SEO a bit.

One question I would have is how many of these visitors from the blog are turning into purchasers on your friend's site? If a lot of them are coming and buying products, and you do the domain redirect, then you could potentially lose a lot of sales. You could make up for the lost sales by increasing your rankings for other keywords, but how much of a boost would you need to make up for the lost sales from the blog? When you are weighing your decision, consider the conversion rate from the blog vs. the conversion rate from search engines.

Another consideration to make is if both sites rank on page 1 for a lot of keywords, and you cannibalize the blog, then you are down to a single placement on the SERP.