Switch from CCTLD to .com - Am I missing anything?
-
We currently have 14 international sites. (.co.uk, .fr, .es, .com.au, etc) and (language differences aside) the content is the same on all.
I want to move this content from example.co.uk to example.com/uk/ (and from example.com.sg to example.com/sg/) to consolidate our domain authority, for brand consistency, and to reduce the overhead of maintaining 14 different domains. Our .com has by far the most domain authority (90) and often outcompetes newer smaller sites like .com.sg in local search) Other sites, however, (like .co.uk DA74) do quite well locally.
My goal is to improve the performance of those sites with a low DA, without hurting the larger sites, and also to avoid the disappearance of local content in local search. e.g. currently when a user searches for "widgets" they find example.co.uk/widgets/ but in future I want them to find example.com/uk/widgets
My plan is to redirect pages with 301 redirects, and use rel-alternate and hreflang metadata to manage indexing. So in the example above, I'd 301 example.co.uk/widgets to example.com/uk/widgets, then use the following metatag on that new page to suggest that it is the UK english version (for users in the UK) of a canonical page in the .com:
(this is in accordance with the suggestion on this page http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077)
My question is: Am I going to severely damage the ranking of, e.g., UK pages in UK search engines by doing this? Is there a better way to do this?
Any input greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Dennis
-
Actually the methodology you have described is correct.
Just two tips/reminders:
- the correct use of the rel="alternate" previews that in the .com pages (for instance) you indicate the other 13 country targeting URLs of your site. That is needed to not seeing, for instance, your .com pages outranking your Spanish ones in Google.es because of a better link profile (or Page Authority);
- for that reason I do really suggest you to implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" in your sitemaps.xml more than into the code of every single page of your site (you don't want to slow your page speed, don't you?).
About what bnspak write, the correct tip is this:
- create the new site, with the new country level subcarpet arquitecture;
- implement cross domain canonical tags in your old ccTld domains
- cancel your ccTlds sitemaps.xml files in GWT and resubmit them... doing so you are explicitly asking Google to recrawl them asap
- Googlebot crawls the ccTlds and discover the rel="canonical"
- Do the 301 page by page
Finally, ccTld or Subcarpet. The decision should be just based on SEO, but on business. Yes, you're going to loose the geotargeting strenght of the ccTlds, but you acquire a stronger domain authority for those sites which were maybe struggling alone. Then, if you plan a correct and effective Content Marketing/Link Building strategy, you can add links to those country targeting subcarpets, links which will benefits all the site as an all.
-
It's hard to argue the contrary when Matt Cutts is saying "Go with CCTLDs", but I get the feeling that his point is an "all things being equal" explanation.
My problem is that all things are not equal. I have a mixed bag. I have an old strong .com (DA 90) and a long list of newer less strong domains (down to DA 27)
Re: one site ranking in multiple countries. Our .com already does this. As one example, the .com homepage ranks on the first page for one of our main head keywords in google.fr, whereas the highest ranking page on the .fr for the same keyword is at the top of page 3.
So "losing a ton of ground" doesn't make a lot of sense here, because traffic isn't going to gravitate towards local content if it's already lingering down around the third page. Wouldn't it make more sense here, to have a french language version of the homepage on the .com and use hreflang to make sure that's the version that ends up in French search results?
I know that 301's don't pass all authority, but they pass some, my feeling is that 13 sites-worth of redirection will have a strong effect on an already strong .com.
Microsoft apply this exact model (one .com, multiple languages in subdirectories, relevant results in local search) and ok, they have a strong domain, but doesn't this show that this is possible?
It would be great to hear about actual experience of similar consolidation moves, successes or failures?
-
I wouldn't drop a ccTLD to move to a .com. There are several benefits you lose
- Most engines recognize ccTLDs as specific to a given country. This can help with ranking for those engines in that country
- Traffic from specific countries tends to gravitate towards a ccTLD (i.e. French are more likely to click on a .fr)
- Engines tend to give a pass on duplicate content to ccTLDs. See Matt Cutts on point.
You're going to lose a ton of ground doing this. Trying to make one site rank well for multiple countries is hard enough. Add in the lost rank from your ccTLDs (a 301 doesn't move all PR).
-
Any time you 301 content it's going to take search engine a while to catch up. You may run into issues with duplicate content for countries that speak all the same langue such as the UK and the USA.
However I had recently read the if you rel=canonical the old page to the new locations it speeds up the indexing process. I'll see if I can find the link for you when i get home later.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is domproof.com?
I see in webmaster tools that I have a bad URL linking from the mydomain.domproof.com. What is this??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AGMContainerControls0 -
Is it possible to find out where traffic is comming from on someone elses website?
Is it possible to find out where traffic is coming from on someone else website? I want to know where the new buyers are coming from who are interested in outsourcing. Attached are some of the pages they would be looking at. Who are visiting these pages and where are they coming from: https://www.upwork.com/blog/ https://www.upwork.com/hiring/ https://www.upwork.com/i/howitworks/client/ https://www.upwork.com/signup/create-account/client_direct https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/browse/ https://www.upwork.com/press/ https://www.freelancer.com/ https://www.freelancer.com/about https://www.freelancer.com/info/how-it-works.php https://www.freelancer.com/showcase https://www.freelancer.com/community https://www.freelancer.com/hire/ https://www.freelancer.com/contest/ https://www.freelancer.com/feesandcharges/ https://www.freelancer.com/freelancers/ http://www.guru.com/ http://www.guru.com/howitworks.aspx http://www.guru.com/about/ http://www.guru.com/help/ http://www.guru.com/blog/ http://www.guru.com/blog/category/hiring-advice/ http://www.guru.com/d/freelancers/ http://www.guru.com/directory http://www.guru.com/answers/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael0 -
Switching site from non-www to www
Howdy folks, I've got a website that is roughly 3 months old. I created it as a naked URL as I often prefer the look but I've noticed that a lot of my competition has www and also some of my clients seem to prefer it as well. I feel like switching it to www will be of long-term benefit for my site. The problem is that I currently have several pages with first page rankings and a backlinks. I am wondering what the negative effects of switching it to www would be, and how I can minimize any issues. I am guessing I should do a redirect, and I have access to some of the backlinks so I can change those as well, but is there anything else? Thoughts? I appreciate the feedback!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswesleyhunt1 -
Rankings Tanked since new Site redesign land new url Structure ? Anything Glaringly Obvious I need to check ?
Hi All, I've just checked my rankings and everything on my eCommerce Site has pretty much tanked really badly since my new URL structure and site redesign was put in a place 2 weeks ago. My url structure was originally long and had underscores but we have now made it clean, shorter and use hyphens. We also have location specific pages and we have incorporated these into the new url structure.Basically it now pretty much follows the breadcrumb trail on our website. We were originally a general online hire site but now we have become niche and only concentrating on one types of products, so we got rid of all the other categories/products and pages we do not deal with anymore. Our Rankings issue , was only bought to light in the most recent MOZ Ranking report so it's looking site google hates our new store. Someone mentioned the other day, that Google may have been doing a Panda/Penguin refresh last weekend, but I am surprised to have dropped like 20 to 50 places for most of my keywords. We have set up the 301 redirects, We have also made the site alot smaller and set up a few thousand 404's to get rid of a lot of redundant pages . We have cut down massively on the thin/duplicate content and have lots of good new content on there. We did new sitemaps , set up schema.org. , increase text to code ratio . Setup our H1-H5 tags on all our pages. made site mobile responsive.. Basically , we are trying to do everything right. Is there anything glaringly obvious , I should be checking ?. I attach a Short url link if anyone wants to have a quick glance- http://goo.gl/7mmEx i.e Could it be a problem with the new urls or anything else that I should be looking at ?.. I.e how can I check to make sure the link juice is being passed on to the new url ? Or is all this expected when doing such changes ? Any advice greatly appreciated .. Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Enormous 7 page drop after switching servers and adding load balancers. Thoughts?
Hello Everyone, I'm a longtime Moz user but I had to switch accounts after switching jobs. I was hoping someone might be able to give me some insight on whats going on if possible. Our startup had first page position for our most valuable keyword: "Crowdfunding real estate" for about 6 or 7 months. Once we launched and switched to a production server behind load balancers, we dropped almost overnight to 7th page and we've been there for about a month. We don't have many links yet and some of the ones we DO have are kind of spammy (no idea where they came from and in process of trying to get them removed) but we thought it'd be strange to see that massive drop. We are even pages below a competitor who has NO links and basically zero content on the page. We don't have any notifications in WMT about a manual penalty or anything. I'd really, really appreciate any advice and If anyone has any ideas, the page is at: PatchofLand.com Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatchofLand0 -
Big hit to traffic a while ago, and slow recovery. Is there anything we've missed?
www.movehub.com We took a big hit to our organic traffic when we implemented an HTML form which included a list of every country in the world, twice. This rolled out onto every page on our website. And it got indexed by Google (webmaster tools showed our content keywords as being those from the form occurring 9000+ times on the site) We've fixed this and the content keywords are back to normal, however our traffic has not yet fully recovered. Is there anything on our site that you think could be sending spam signals to Google, or could be impeding our organic traffic growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyCatlow0 -
.com ranking over other ccTLD's that were created
We had a ecommerce website that used to function as the website for every other locale we had around the world. For example the French version was Domain.com/fr_FR/ or a German version in English would be Domain.com/en_DE/. Recently we moved all of our larger international locales to their corresponding ccTLD so no we have Domain.fr and Domain.de.(This happened about two months ago) The problem with this is that we are getting hardly any organic traffic and sales on these new TLD's. I am thinking this is because they are new but I am not positive. If you compare the traffic we used to see on the old domain versus the traffic we see on the new domain it is a lot less. I am currently going through to make sure that all of the old pages are not up and the next thing I want to know is for the old pages would it be better to use a 301 re-direct or a rel=canonical to the new ccTLD to avoid duplicate content and those old pages from out ranking our new pages? Also what are some other causes for our traffic being down so much? It just seems that there is a much bigger problem but I don't know what it could be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Help Needed - 301 a .co.uk to a .com Serp Questions
Hey, really need some help deciding what to do... I have a .co.uk site, its my oldest and best site of my network and accounts for maybe 30-40% of my income. Although its a .co.uk site, it actually makes most of its from from USA traffic and targets many terms for the US market - but the problem is that due to it being a .co.uk it doesnt rank as well in G .com and over the last few years Google has defiantly widened the gap as such for the ability for a .co.uk to rank in G .com. Many terms that I used to be #1 for in G .com, I now rank position 5-10 only, but in G .co.uk I'm #1 and often with a duo listing so I wouldnt put the loss of rankings in G .com down to just losing rankings naturally. Now many of my key pages are gradually losing rankings in G .com which is not good and really frustrating Feedback Needed So my dilemma is do I risk my best site and 301 it to a .com hosted in the US for potential at a guess 50% increase in revenues and more future potential (If the 301 worked well and got some US rankings back - Im sure longtail would increase lots too) ? If people with experience with 301ing sites to a new domain could let me know how they did or if you're an SEO and have done this many times, how many times on average has Serps remained stable / unchanged ? Trying to work out the reward to risk ratio, like on average if the transition is seamless 90% of the time it would seem worth the gamble, but if its 50% then I would say its not worth it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goody2shoes0