Has anyone relocated a website from one country to another?
-
Has anyone relocated a website from one country to another?
I want to replace all reference from one country (UK) to another (Australia)
Phone number change, currency change, address will change
Meta/products/content/urls will remain the same
The .com URL will be associated to Australia
Will the website keep its ranking or will it be damaged to the point where another website should be built from scratch?
-
Never shift a website from one country to another country by myself but let me tell you what theory tells us.
- Map Changing
If you website was associated to any business registered in Google Maps and other yellow pages than you carefully need to remove all listings and re-register it on another country. These will defiantly going to hurt your rankings on specific country where you were ranking before.
The problem is results for every country are different from others so if the rankings didn’t really changed (most probably it will fluctuate for local keywords) the rankings that you had in US will not be the same in AU.
What you should be doing.
- Change your NAP and Re-register your maps in Google and other Yellow pages.
- Update content accordingly
- Get new links from .AU domains
- Change your targeted country in Google Webmaster Tool
- Get links from local keywords
And you will see your rankings will start appearing in google.com.au
Hope this helps!
-
Thanks Robert. Yep all those accounts are in place. I understand that I can monitor the impacts of the change. But I would like to get an understanding of whether its worth making the change in the first place.
Anyone else redirected an established website (5 years plus with PR 3 +) to another country.
-
Hi,
I highly advise you to acquire a Google Webmaster Tools and a connect that with your Analytics account to facilitate and monitor the change in your target audience. After you have set both up, here are the 2 main features that help to solve your problem:
1. Hreflang attributes. Google states at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Many websites serve users from around the world with content translated or targeted to users in a certain region. Google uses the
rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in Search results.Hreflang offers website or subpage targeting per language (English not French), country (so Australia not the UK). But note that it requires manually changing your site's mark-up.
2. Also of use is Country Targeting https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en
If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, and targets users in a particular geographic location, you can provide us with information to help us determine how your site appears in our search results. This improves Google Search results for geographic queries, and it won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country. See a full list of domains Google treats as generic.
-
thanks for quick response - the URL will NOT change
the existing site is a .com
Currently I redirect the .co.uk and the .com.au to the .com
The website is targetted to UK via Google's Country Targeting setting
Am rather surprised to hear you have seen no changes! How old were these sites? Did they have much page rank?
-
Re-reading your question it sounds like the URL will change.
So lets say you have funstuff.co.uk and your new site is funstuff.com.au the best stepn is to 301 re-direct the .co.uk to the new geo-targeted site and it will transfer 90% of the existing link juice.
We've done this many times and it works just fine.
-
Hi,
Will the URL change?
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
-
Should we reinstate the old website?
In a nut shell we had a great site that performed well and grew month on month but it perhaps looked a bit dated. A decision was taken to build a new site and the job given to a PR agency for some reason. All the titles, H1 tags, page content and url structure was changed and now the site has drop 50% of organic traffic. I've been tasked with trying to rebuild rankings but so far it's not going well. A snapshot of the old website still exists and i'm very tempted to have it reinstated in the hopes that our traffic will recover. What are your thoughts?
Technical SEO | | etienneb0 -
Content from Another Site
Hi there - I have a client that says they'll be "serving content by retrieving it from another URL using loadHTMLFile, performing some manipulations on it, and then pushing the result to the page using saveHTML()." Just wondering what the SEO implications of this will be. Will search engines be able to crawl the retrieved content? Is there a downside (I'm assuming we'll have some duplicate content issues)? Thanks for the help!!
Technical SEO | | NetStrategies1 -
Duplicate Pages on GWT when redesigning website
Hi, we recently redesigned our online shop. We have done the 301 redirects for all product pages to the new URL (and went live about 1.5 week ago), but GWT indicated that the old product URL and the new product URL are 2 different pages with the same meta title tags (duplication) - when in fact, the old URL is 301 redirecting to the new URL when visited. I found this article on google forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/CvCjeNOxOUw
Technical SEO | | Essentia
It says we either just wait for Google to re-crawl, of use the fetch URL function for the OLD URLs. Question is, after i fetch the OLD URL to tell Google that it's being redirected, should i click the button 'submit to index' or not? (See screengrab - please note that it was the OLD URL that was being fetched, not the NEW URL). I mean, if i click this button, is it telling Google that: a. 'This old URL has been redirected, therefore please index the new URL'? or
b. 'Please keep this old URL in your index'? What's your view on this? Thanks1 -
Website content has been scraped - recommended action
So whilst searching for link opportunities, I found a website that has scraped content from one of our websites. The website looks pretty low quality and doesn't link back. What would be the recommended course of action? Email them and ask for a link back. I've got a feeling this might not be the best idea. The website does not have much authority (yet) and a link might look a bit dodgy considering the duplicate content Ask them to remove the content. It is duplicate content and could hurt our website. Do nothing. I don't think our website will get penalised for it since it was here first and is in the better quality website. Possibly report them to google for scraping? What do you guys think?
Technical SEO | | maxweb0 -
How to search HTML source for an entire website
Is there a way for me to do a "view source" for an entire website without having to right-click every page and select "view source" for each of them?
Technical SEO | | SmartWebPros0 -
How to allow one directory in robots.txt
Hello, is there a way to allow a certain child directory in robots.txt but keep all others blocked? For instance, we've got external links pointing to /user/password/, but we're blocking everything under /user/. And there are too many /user/somethings/ to just block every one BUT /user/password/. I hope that makes sense... Thanks!
Technical SEO | | poolguy0 -
How to handle a merge with another site
I own a gaming site at legendzelda.net Recently a site zelda-temple.net wanted to merge communities and sites. We pretty much scrapped their content (a lot was articles I already had topics on), merged the user databases, and redirected the domain to mine. What is the best seo way to redirect that domain. I tried to set up a 301 on the entire domain to gain all the backlinks that site had (A LOT) but it seems as if a lot are not being picked up by the open site explorer and other tools. Advice?
Technical SEO | | webfeatseo0