Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I migrate .co.uk to .com?
-
I have previously searched the forum and could not find a definitive answer on this subject so would appreciate any guidance.
I have just joined a new company, we have a .co.uk site which gets lots of traffic.
We have a .com site which is targeting USA and .com/de/ targeting Germany. 'hreflang' is configured on the .com (between the USA and German sites) but not on .co.uk. This means that in the eyes of search engines (and Moz Pro) the 2 domains are competitors (and the .co.uk has much more presence than the .com in the USA).
I know how to fix this and I am in the process of doing so. My question is whether it would make sense to migrate the .co.uk site to .com
As previously mentioned the .co.uk site already does very well both in the UK and around the world (as our product is well known in our niche). As .co.uk can only primarily be targeted to UK would our global reach increase enough to justify migrating it to .com?
We have dealers/distributors in maybe 30 countries and are continuing to expand, we will at point point add additional languages so my suggestion is that we migrate now as the authority of the .co.uk will help the emerging markets as well as increase our visibility in markets that are not currently primary targets.
We are also in the process of hiring new staff specifically to focus on Content Marketing. So again this suggests having the 1 domain will make sense in the long run (as any value gained from content marketing success will be seen by all country/language focussed sites).
I am also planning to rebuild the sites in the next few months as the current ones are not fit for purpose so the migration would coincide with this (I know this is not ideal).
Apologies for the lengthy question, I hope the additional background information will help in providing some feedback to help me make the decision.
David
-
Hi Matt.
I have one more question in regards to your initial reply.
I am on board with redirecting the .co.uk site to .com/UK/ but what would you then suggest we do with the new .com homepage?
I originally thought from your answer that you was suggesting to redirect the new .com homepage to .com/UK now I don't believe this to be the case.
Would you suggest having a location selector page on the .com homepage with ?
We currently only have 3 main locations (although we are expanding rapidly) so I am not sure this is really required.
Or would you have it set in GWT as targeting no specific location, and again set . Would this give us the best chance to try and grow in areas we do not currently have a regional website for?
Thanks again for all your assistance so far. Much appreciated!
-
Thanks again for a very comprehensive answer. As the URLs will invariable change once we rebuild it looks best to hold off the migration now and do it all in one go later in the year.
The main reason I prefer not to redirect the homepage to a sub-directory is that it looks a little messy, and if someone from USA visits our homepage I would not want them automatically directed to the /uk/ site. But it seems this may be the best of the options, thanks for the input.
-
You said you don't like the idea of redirecting the root domain to a sub dir - but why? It's passing the full value of the UK site to the new location of the UK site. Makes perfect sense in my head. I would definitely do so.
I would only recommend the /US version because of the hreflangs. You can do it the other way, it's just a bit more technical to build the hreflang tags. You can use this example I've used before, though:
" hreflang="x-default" />
" hreflang="en-uk" />
" hreflang="en-de" />This will do the trick, I believe. Then will display that in the header of every page and the request URL will grab the URL you're on so you'll end up with hreflangs for the two URL structures.
You said you could migrate .co.uk to .com/UK asap - do it as soon as you can, as long as the URL structure won't change. If you're moving from say .co.uk/about.html to .com/UK/about-us/ then you can't do it until those URLs exist. I wouldn't move the existing site over now if the URLs are going to change. This is what I was saying above - you don't want to go from .co.uk/about.html to .com/UK/about.html (and then in August) to .com/UK/about-us/
Make sense?
-
Thanks for the reply Matt.
The new site will not be ready to go live until July/August so we have plenty of time to prepare.
So you would migrate the .co.uk site to .com/uk and not directly to the .com root?
Not sure I like the idea of the root of the domain redirecting to a sub-directory (e.g. .com/UK) and it would also be difficult to migrate /co.uk to .com and .com to .com/US at the same time.
Would you then not recommend keeping the root of .com targeting en-US lang as it currently is as this would be a lot easier than moving .com to .com/us/
Or maybe we should migrate .co.uk to .com/UK asap as this then gives us 4 months or so for link equity to pass through the 301s.
Thanks.
-
If it were my site, I would move the UK site to .com/UK, then have .com/DE and .com/US.
Then I would 301 redirect all the UK links back to their counterparts on the new site, keeping as much authority as possible. Point the main homepage at .com/UK and all the inner links as they currently are.
Doing this now will definitely help your expansion in the future as well.
I would do all this after you've rebuilt the site, though, because you don't want to do 301s to 301s. Figure out what the new site will be, do the 301s to that one directly. No intermediate jumps ... it's a longer time to implement but you're better off in the long run.
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
-
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
Organic Traffic Drop of 90% After Domain Migration
We moved our domain is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com on April 4th. It was migrated to https://www.metro-manhattan.com Google Search Console continues to show about 420of URLs indexed for the old "NYC" domain. This number has not dropped on Search Console. Don't understand why Google has not de-indexed the old site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
For the new "Metro" domain only 114 pages are being shown as valid. Our search volume has dropped from about 85 visits a day to 12 per day. 390 URLs appear as "crawled- currently not indexed". Please note that the migrated content is identical. Nothing at all changed. All re-directs were implemented properly. Also, at the time of the migration we filed a disavow for about 200 spammy links. This disavow file was entered for the old domain and the new one as well. Any ideas as to how to trouble shoot this would be much appreciated!!! This has not been very good for business.0 -
My .com ranks well in the US but not in the UK or other countries?
My companies is based in the US, but our customer base is 50% international. The majority of our international customers are from english speaking countries like the UK, AU, NZ, etc. We currently rank well for 2 of our industries core keywords in the US, but are not even on the radar in the UK or AU. I do generate international backlinks, although not as much as the US backlinks (approximately 25% intl, 75% US). Should I purchase localized urls like .co.uk or .com.au and point those at my .com? Any guidance the community could provide would be greatly appreciated?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | batchbook0 -
Moving from a .org to a .com
We have been a .org website for as long as the web as been around. We just recently got the .com for our organization and wondered what the transition process would be like. We offer a lot of content to help parents with parenting and so as a content driven site we have about 13k external links and 1,200 linking root domains links to our site. Will we loose all our links in the transition to the .com? Is there a way to do this well that helps our brand and also retains our google ranking? Thanks so much for any and all help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | movieguide0 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
Help - .ie vs .co.uk in google uk
We have a website that for years has attracted a high level of organic searches and had a very high level of links. It has the .ie extension (Ireland) and did very well when competing in the niche market it is in on google.co.uk. We have the same domain name but in .co.uk format and basically redirected traffic to it when people typed in .co.uk instead. Since the latest panda update, we have noticed that the number of visits organically has dropped to a quarter of what it was and this is continuing to go down. We have also noticed that the .ie version is no longer listed in google and has been replaced by .co.uk. As we've never exchanged or submitted links for the .co.uk domain this means there are only links indexed in google. Is there any way I can get google to re-index the site using the .ie domain rather than the .co.uk domain? I am hemorrhaging sales now and becoming a much more withdrawn person by the day!!! PS - the .co.uk domain is set up as a domain alias in plesk with both .ie and .co.uk domain dns pointing to the the same IP address. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rufo
Steve0 -
Is it worth switching from .net to .com if you own both domain names
For over 20 years the company I work for has used www.company.net as their TLD, because we could not register www.company.com at that time. However, currently we also own www.company.com www.company.com has a 301 re-direct to www.company.net We are a global company, and market leader in our industry. Our company name is associated with the product we make, and our competitors use our company name as their targeted keywords to attract visitors to their sites because our company name is synonym with the product we and they make. As we are a global company we also have lots of TLDcc's. The email address of all our employees worldwide have a .net email address extension. Would you advice switching from www.company.net to www.company.com??? And if so, what would be the reasons for this switch. Would it only be for branding purposes? Looking forward to some insights before taking on such an invasive switch (because of the switch of all email addresses of employees worldwide). Best regards, Astrid Groeneveld
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cordstrap0 -
Changing a url from .html to .com
Hello, I have a client that has a site with a .html plugin and I have read that its best to not have this. We currently have pages ranking with this .html plug in. However If we take the plug in out will we lose rankings? would we need a 301 or something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0