When to 301 a No1 ranking site to the new domain?

[Brocberry]

I have a site [company.com] that ranks number one for the products of my brand but I'm moving all the efforts to a dedicated brand domain. The old site covered a number of small brands and we had no dedicated brand sites, but we now focus on just this one brand and it doesn't belong on the old company domain name.  BRAND belongs on the new brand.com

Because of the age of the old company site and because it had the first copy about the brand, it's still ranking well for the brand product names, and the new site has some duplicate content issues that I'm in the throws of resolving.

RANKS

• Company.com :  number one for all product names
• Brand.com : nowhere for product brand names but top for the brand name (as I say, the product pages on this site have duplicate content issues which is likely keeping them ranked low - Hades low.

I would rather not maintain two websites and I want to give brand.com every bit of available oomph , so should I at some point 301 the old company site to the new one?

If so, is now the time?

Thanks

[CaseyKluver]

Sooner is better than later.

Make sure when you 301 redirect the site, you not only redirect the site, but redirect the individual pages to the new pages also so that any of the internal ranking pages pass the rank also.

Make sure to verity the new site in Google webmaster tools and notify them that the old domain has permanently moved to the new domain. In my experience, you will usually see direct ranking transfer within 2-4 weeks max.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

One thing to keep in mind is that you will probably lose your rankings for that 2-4 week period. So do it ASAP but not during a peak sales period.

[Brocberry]

Thanks FUM

I was wondering whether I needed to redirect individual pages, it makes sense that I would.

There are 6 important pages on the site with one-to-one relationships with the new site, and quite a few pages besides, but webmaster tools is telling me there are 100 indexed pages and 700 crawled but not indexed pages.  There are not 100 valuable pages on the site, and I think the not-indexed is because the cart has dynamically created all those urls.

I suppose I just need to determine which pages are worthwhile redirecting individually. Oddly, seomoz site explorer is giving me two top pages. How else might I determine the top pages?

[CaseyKluver]

I would determine a top/important page as one that is not only ranking well for your terms, but pages that may be receiving traffic from other sources. Check out Google Analytics and sort by top pages and filter by source and redirect the ones that are actually seeing inbound traffic.