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I have a situation where I have 2 sites about pretty equivalent topics. Originally I didn't know which domain was better so I tried both. Now, clearly one has got more links to it, and has a higher PageRank, and a number of pages there rank in Google's top-10 for their keywords.
My question is: what is the right way of redirecting the original domain's pages to the better domain so that the pages have a higher chance of ranking because they would be under the stronger domain?
A 301 redirect is exactly what you're looking for. Just do a 301 redirect from domain1.com/example.html to domain2.com/example.html. That will tell the search engines, and users, where the content is located. Additionally, it will tell Google that the new URL is the permanent URL for that content and to "transfer" all incoming links to the new URL.
This is beneficial because internal linking is an important part of SEO. By having all of your content under one domain allows you to have a structured hierarchy of content which is a great way to prioritize content for both users and search engines.
