Moving a poison word domain

..worth it? and if so best approach...

[mcavill]

I recently launched a site on a domain www.widget-directory.com - it initially popped up in the top 10 of the SERPs for the keywords I was targeting, along with fresh tag, then disappeared.

It’s now reappeared, all pages indexed, but buried deep 500+ in the SERPs.

I read the poison word article, [searchengineworld.com...] about 1/2 an hour after buying the initial domain so thought I'd buy www.widget-i.com as a back up.
I’m concerned this poor SERP placement might be due to having the word "directory" in the domain and on a couple of pages. It’s got no history at archive.org.

I've spent very little time on the link campaign, and as such haven't really got much to lose just by moving all the content over to the shorter and hopefully better domain name, although I have a couple of concerns:

If I put a 301 redirect will that also point any "poison penalty" at the new site?

If I don't 301 it, but just bring the old site down and put the content on the new domain is the duplicate content filter going to bury me in the SERP's again?

Or was it just the fresh tag giving me an initial boost in the SERP's and I should just relax and promote it as normal?