What is the best way to replace a .co.uk with a .com name
-
Hi i would like to know about my site which is www.in2town.co.uk which i am currently revamping and i am now in the process of buying a .com name and would like to know the best way to uise it.
What i mean is, i have a lot of links going to the www.in2town.co.uk and would like to know should i do a permantent redirect to the .co.uk with the .com or is it possible to have the co.uk replaced with the .com
i am trying to work out the best way to do this at the moment as i have never done this before. now after buying the .com for my domain name i would like to know should i use it as a redirect to my main site, or should i develop a sister site and use it.
any advice would be great.
-
Hi Diane.
As I understand it, your site is currently focused on the UK and you have a .co.uk domain. You have acquired the .com domain and wish your site to address an international audience.
My suggestion would be to make the change as follows:
-
migrate your existing site to the .com domain. Either the default domain will be UK English, or you would create a folder for the UK.Your new URLs would look like www.intown.com/uk, www.intown.com/es, www.intown.com/fr. Each of these directories would represent a targeted country for which you have localized content.
-
ensure your content for each area is truly localized. First, be sure to use the right dialect of the language. For example, Spanish for Spain is not the same as Spanish for Mexico, There is a significant difference. Next, be sure to use the right monetary units and systems of measurements for the chosen country. Also use the proper meta language tag. Each of these actions is designed to clearly inform your users and Google the content is directed for a specific country.
-
using Google WMT set your geographic target for each country. For example, the /es section would be for Spain. Assuming you performed the other steps correctly this step shouldn't be necessary, but I recommend it because it is easy to do and helps ensure the site is properly directed in case other steps are missed
-
you can use geo-targeting but I suggest only using it on your home page. Offer images of the flags of various countries to allow visitors to select their preferred country. Place this images in a prominent position at the top of your site.
-
while you are working on this migration, keep the new site blocked with robots.txt. Once the new site is up and running, you will need to make the switch. Place a 301 redirect from the old .co.uk domain to the new .com domain. Ensure the 301 is working properly and then (very important) remove the robots.txt block of the .com site.
The .com site will now be your new site. It will take about 30 days for the site URLs to be updated in Google SERPs.
As a final step, any time you migrate your site you want to ensure all links under your control, both internal and external, point to the new URL. Any signatures, social pages, etc. should all be updated. There will be a minor loss of link juice due to the move which should be easily offset by the new traffic you will receive once you target other countries. As you earn links from the new countries, be sure to obtain them on that country's page rather then the root home page. For example, links from France should ideally go to your /fr home page or one of the French internal pages.
Congratulations on obtaining the .com and good luck.
-
-
I agree with both of them. Dont do it. Work on what you have and make it the best it can be.
People dont like duplicates, and Google doesnt like duplicates either
-
You will likely need the assistance of your hosting company in making the change, best to run your intentions past them via a support ticket.
As you intend to go international with your website, a .com would make sense. Just changing the Top Level Domain (tld) from .co.uk to .com is a simple process and low risk. Just need to inform Google (via GWT) and the other search engines the moment the change happens.
Your content won't be affected, as the only change will be the tld. When search engine bots revisit your site, they will take a cached copy and soon after reindex your site with the .com, so long as the domain name (in2town) and the page names remain the same. Lowest risk strategy.
There are other considerations such as Language. Will your expanded target audience all speak/read English, or will you need to have the website in multiple languages. If so, there are SEO considerations there.
Best of luck
-
i am looking at making the site international as i want to attract spain, france, and america. can you recommend the best way of doing this as i do not want to cause problems with content that is under the co.uk and do i need to mention anything to my hosting company
-
I agree with Maxwell's comments.
Also, if your website is predominantly for UK visitors, may as well stick with .co.uk rather than changing to .com Your website is UK hosted so sticking with the .co.uk ties in nicely.
If your website is international/global then certainly consider changing to .com
If you do, ensure you use Google Webmaster Tools when making the change from .co.uk to .com to notify Google of the change.
Hope that helps.
Regards
Simon
-
I would recommend against developing a sister site, since you will most likely have lots of duplicate content across both sites and the two sites will compete with each other for SERP rankings. Best practice is to use 301 redirects to send traffic from .co.uk to .com or vice versa
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's the best way to pass link juice to a page on another domain?
I'm working with a non-profit, and their donation form software forces them to host their donation pages on a different domain. I want to attempt to get their donation page to appear in their sitelinks in Google (under the main website's entry), but it seems like the organization's donation forms are at a disadvantage because they're not actually hosted on that site. I know that no matter what I do, there's no way to "force" a sitelink to appear the way I want it, but... I was trying to think if there's a way I can work around this. Do you think 1) creating a url like orgname.org/donate and having that be a 301 redirect to the donation form, and 2) using the /donate redirect all over the site (instead of linking directly to the form) would help? Are there alternatives other folks recommend?
Technical SEO | | clefevre0 -
Changing a domain name, pages redirection
when changing a domain name, should we redirect all the pages to their new pages or only the indexed pages? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Best Schema Advice
Hi, I am new here and I have searched for but not got a definitive answer for this. I am sorting out a website which is a scaffolding company operating in a particular area. They are only interested in targeting a particular area and from what I have read through here I need to mark the site up with schema mentioning their company name and address. My issue is that I seem to find lots of conflicting advice about what should go it and how it should be laid out. I would love to know peoples opinions on where the best guide for setting up schema correctly for a site like this. They use wordpress, I am ok with inserting code to the site etc, I just want to make sure I get it right from the start. Once I have done this, I understand that I need to get local citations using the same NAP as how the site is marked up. Sorry for what might seem like a daft question but I am a designer and I am still learning the ins and outs of SEO. Thanks
Technical SEO | | kirstyseo0 -
Which is The Best Way to Handle Query Parameters?
Hi mozzers, I would like to know the best way to handle query parameters. Say my site is example.com. Here are two scenarios. Scenario #1: Duplicate content example.com/category?page=1
Technical SEO | | jombay
example.com/category?order=updated_at+DESC
example.com/category
example.com/category?page=1&sr=blog-header All have the same content. Scenario #2: Pagination example.com/category?page=1
example.com/category?page=2 and so on. What is the best way to solve both? Do I need to use Rel=next and Rel=prev or is it better to use Google Webmaster tools parameter handling? Right now I am concerned about Google traffic only. For solving the duplicate content issue, do we need to use canonical tags on each such URL's? I am not using WordPress. My site is built on Ruby on Rails platform. Thanks!0 -
Best way to setup large site for multi language
Hello, I am setting up a new site which is going to be very large, over 250,000 products. Most of our customers are in the UK (45%), the rest are from various European countries and the USA. Unfortunately we only have a team of two people writing content for these pages in English. I would value some input on the best way to setup my website structure for ranking. Obviously the best would be individual country oriented domains I.e. domain.fr domain.de domain.co.uk . However we wouldnt have the time to create content for every page and most pages would contain the same content as the English domain. Would I get a penalty for this from google? The second choice is to follow the example of overstock.com and pull in information relating to each country I.e. currency and delivery time. this would be a lot easier but I am concerned that the lack of geo focus would effect my rankings. Does any one have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
Default.aspx and domain name difference
I am getting duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors for www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/default.aspx. I thought that they were the same page, so I'm not sure how to avoid getting the duplicate content and title errors. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | DMacy0 -
What is the best way to close my blog?
I have a blog on a separate address to my website. http://cheshireweddingphotographyblog.co.uk/ and http://celynnenphotography.co.uk Now I'm going to have a new website which is going to be wordpress based and it will sit on the main website (http://celynnenphotography.co.uk ) and include both gallery and blog. now the blog does well enough on google, etc.. so i wanted to mix their SEO juju and all that, but what happens with my blog? Do i: Stop paying for hosting, nice and simple. OR Do I need to do something?
Technical SEO | | IoanSaid0 -
Best place for new relevant content ?
Hi everyone, The background to my question is that one of the companies I work for has just produced a load of videos answering many of the common questions about their products, for the ecommerce part of their site. I've got these videos transcribed which I want to use as the backbone to some of the main pages on the site (some of which are already ranking reasonably well). I was thinking of putting this content on their department page (so for example their departments would be kitesurfing, land kites, toy kites etc.) above links to their sections (e.g. kite surf kites, kite surf boards etc.). Do you think this would be a good place to put a large amount of text ? (the text will be in a scrollable div) - i.e. could it get in the way of the links which are currently passing juice deeper in to the site ? Alternatives are to put the videos under the links to the sections (which would place them below the fold), or to place each video on its own page and simply link to these pages from the departments page (although it is the department page we wish to rank). Another alternative is to put links to the sections both before and after the new content. Hope that all makes sense! Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | stukerr0