I mainatain a website which is hosting on a .co.uk web address. The site is now dealing to oversea markets, so its important we are found in search engines overseas. One solution (and the only one I can currently think of) is to have a folder which has landing pages designed for a particular country - for example: mydomain.co.uk/fr would display a page in French. Then in Webmaster Tools I woudl specifify that folder is intended for France. HOWEVER, because the domain is .co.uk, Google doesnt give me that option within Webmaster Tools. I could have the site hosted on a .com domain BUT that would probably affect the existing rankings that the .co.uk has achieved.
I suppose the question Im asking is how can I move the website onto a .com domain without it affecting our current .co.uk rankings?
Just do a 301 redirect from your existing .co.uk pages to the new .com site. The search engines will recognise that, and retain your rankings. And it won’t inconvenience existing visitors in any way. (Of course, you’ll have to retain the .co.uk domain in order do that, but you’d probably want to anyway.)
hi Mikl: Are you sure setting up a 301 redirect wont affect my existing rankings? Will Google just replace the .co.uk with the .com version at exactly the same positions?
Doing a 301 redirect won’t in itself hurt your rankings. To be specific, any benefits the existing domain has from inward links will continue to apply to the new domain.
But that doesn’t mean that your new domain will be in exactly the same position in the search results. Google (and other engines) take geographical location into account when ranking pages. So, if someone goes to Google’s UK site, and does a search that specifies “pages from the UK”, Google will give some preference to pages that it considers to be “from the UK”. In doing so, it looks for pages that are: (i) physically hosted in the UK; (ii) have .uk in the URL; or (iii) have been registered in Google Webmaster Tools as being targeted to the UK.
If someone goes to the main Google site and does the same search, then Google won’t give that priority to UK pages, so those pages will tend to appear lower in the results, and other pages (for example, those from a .com domain) will conversely appear higher.
But don’t get too hung up on this. The geographical element is only one of many factors used in ranking pages. You’re right to use a .com if you are targeting a world-wide audience, but it won’t make a huge difference to your rankings.
Going back to your question about 301s, these are some references that you might find useful:
In Google Webmaster Tools, under “Site configuration”, there is a “Change of Address” option. This gives you step-by-step instructions how to notify Google if you are moving your site to a new domain. It’s very easy to do and you shouldn’t lose any ranking in the process. (The only time I’ve used it, I was splitting a site into two, and the two new sites both rank better than the one old one did. )
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