So, I have a PR4 site that has been around for 2 1/2 years. I just registered a much more keyword friendly .com domain name. What I'm wondering is whether or not I will be penalized for, in essence, pointing my dns entry for the new domain to the same location as the old domain (but doing some PHP coding to massage things like titles and such, as well as creating an entirely new CSS stylesheet, as I'm starting fresh.) When I ask about being penalized, I'm looking from the perspective of both domains. Thanks!
I've been reading up on this a lot the last two days and it seems that 301 redirects are the SE friendly way of using multiple domain names. Correct me if I'm wrong.
301's won't allow you to use multiple domains. Search engines will eventually phase out the old domain (that had the 301 on it) and give the new domain (where the 301 was headed too) the same ranks and PR (though please be aware this does take time, sometimes a few months). You are unlikely to trigger duplicate content flags if it's a clean move, proper redirects and such. You can only use one domain if you want to have your content rank anywhere, unless you're going to cloak or something like that, but that's a whole different ball game.
So, unless I switch up the content, I'm really out of luck with having the new domain that's more keyword friendly, right? Probably more so if they're hosted on the same shared server, right?