SEO friendly way of linking/redirecting 2 domains to 1 - shoes example ;)

Question

Suppose I have a shoe shop with website: example.com. I generate some traffic, but only 10 visitors per week. I then realize that green shoes are very popular and what everybody searches for.

Of course I then change my header, title and body accordingly to position the green shoes in my collection. As a result I then see more than 20 visitors per week. There is a lot of competition. Now I have this smart idea to buy the domain greenshoes.com.

QUESTION 1: Now how do I best redirect the traffic on greenshoes.com for maximal Google SEO effect to my domain example.com. In other words, what do I need to do to get maximum Google points for the keywords green shoes (for the original domain). Is this through 301 or 302 redirect? DNS alteration or domain pointer? Other means?

Answer 1

The best way to get the maximum SEO affect is to serve the site on GreenShoes.com, redirecting greenshoes to myshoeshop.com will not gain you much for the GreenShoes terms.

With regards to handling canonical domains the Google Webmaster Blog recommended using:

Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible
Where possible, the most important step is often to use appropriate 301 redirects. These redirects send visitors and search engine crawlers to your preferred domain and make it very clear which URL should be indexed. This is generally the preferred method as it gives clear guidance to everyone who accesses the content.

Note however that doing this will effectively remove the greenshoes.com results from the index.

Answer 2

In my opinion there is 2 good ways.

The first one is to build a new website (the satellite) with the new domain which is corporate one and just deals with green shoes. You put a big call-to-action like "Buy Here" which points to the buying page of your online shop.

The second method is to point all your domain on the same server and use a canonical link to declare which website is the main.