I have an eccommerce site set up on a domain with poor keyword choice. THe site has nearly 0 backlinks, but it has been indexed and gets some sales from facebook I wanted a more keyword rich domain so I bought one and copied the site to it. I plan to do a lot more seo work with this one. My question is what should I do to keep both sites up with the same content, so I don't get penalized for duplicate content? I've put a disallow: / in the robots.txt of both sites for the moment
you should 301 re-direct your old domain to your new domain. You should NEVER have 2 sites withe the same content. Also since your new domain has no backlinks, you can take advantage of the backlinks from your old domain when it redirects to your new domain and it will give you a boost. Good luck!
In your webmaster tools dashboard you can submit the information that your site moved, then setup a 301 redirecting traffic to your new site.
Quite honestly - you didn't have to go about purchasing a new keyword enriched domain name. You could have achieved similar results by doing some better onpage optimization and gaining a few backlinks. Bare in mind - you already have a site running, why would you want to take it down? Or worse setup a replica. I think you should continue to promote your existing site despite how ever the domain name is.
all you have to do is a 301 redirect. just do a search on 301 redirect and you will find out how to. a 301 redirect not only redirects the visitors to the new site, it also tells google that your site has permanently moved so no duplicate content penalty