To cut a long story short... When, 2 years ago, I created my site SEO was the last thing on my mind and I chose a domain name that is somewhat unrelated to the subject of the site. Think along the lines of Amazon sells books, not rain forests, Google is a search engine, not a maths site. It has recently come to my attention that the primary keywords I am competing for are available as a domain in all the TLD's I would normally register. After some research I have also realised that a keyword rich domain name has SEO advantages. So I have hatched a cunning plan... To give an example, I currently run foobar.com. This is an established site, with a good brand, great reputation and real world merchandise etc, and as such the primary site will always remain on that domain. I intend to register keywordtastic.com (.net, .co.uk etc) and place a summary of activity of foobar.com on a SEO enhanced single page on the new domain (for example titles of the latest blogs, forum threads, articles etc - but no actual full content or deeper pages). This summary will link directly to foobar.com. So think of these pages as a remote advertisement for foobar.com. As I see it the benefits are that the keywordtastic domains are likely to be well placed in search results for those keywords, and visitors will click through to foobar.com. In addition to this foobar will also benefit from a few more incoming links. However... Like all cunning plans there is probably something I am missing here. The thing that concerns me the most is that Google will nail both foobar and the keywordtastic domains for duplicate content. So the question is should I run with this, or just register the domains and park them to prevent a competitor realising what I have recently discovered (i.e. the availability of the keyword domains) Cheers
Buy the new domain. If most of your activity is online, redirect the old domain to it. If the offline merchandise is a big factor, redirect the new domain to the old. (using permanent 301 redirects)