Should I 301 this ecommerce site, or turn it into a blog?

[mozUser1469235069221]

Hey everyone, I have a couple of ecommerce sites - Site 1 (DA33) and Site 2 (DA24). They are in the same niche and have the same products, a relic of how our business started in 2007. But now we just want to manage one brand, Site 1. This is our question: Is it better to 301 Site 2 into Site 1 (page by page redirect), or would it be valuable to instead turn Site 2 into a blog site?

Site 2 currently has some good relevant links to it that would be nice to 301 to Site 1, but the value of 301 redirects seems to have been steadily diminishing since roughly 2011.

If we take Site 2 and turn it into a WordPress blog, develop some good industry-relevant content on it (and outsource/allow guest posts on it for relevant quality content as well), and sometimes we drop a link or two into the content to help promote Site 1 - would that be more valuable than a 301?

Obviously, a lot more "work" goes into creating a content site than just 301'ing it over. I guess the question is: does a page-by-page 301 of a niche-identical and even product-identical site into another have more of a benefit for SEO than getting some content-relevant anchor text links on a blog site?

What would you do in my position?

[EGOL]

First, I assume that Site 1 gets more sales and has better rankings than Site 2.  I also assume that neither site has any type of Panda or Penguin or other type of problem with Google.  If that is true....

Do the redirect as you explained... page-by-page.

Then develop a blog on the same domain - in a folder like... siteA.com/blog/

Before you do anything, assess the content on the two domains.  Where you have superior content on Site 2, use that content to improve the quality of Site 1.

[MoosaHemani]

nailed it!