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.
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
-
Huge organic traffic drom after a perfect domain migration. What to do?
Hi, I already asked the question on different places. But so far nobody could help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dennis1992038
Hope someone can help me out. If possible.
I migrated my website https://vihara.nl to https://meditatieinstituut.nl and lost about 80% traffic (see printscreens). It's over more than a month ago now and there is no sign of getting it back up. Maybe there is nothing to do and
1. I have to be patient and traffic comes back in a few months.
or
2. There is nothing to do and I've lost everything I've build up in the last years. Start over again to get the rankings back.
or maybe, maybe
3. I just forgot something that I still need to do to get the rankings back up. Or there is something I did not think of... This is done: The website is migrated 1 on 1. No changes in content, url, code, etc. Everything is exactly the same as on the previous domain. 301 redirects whole domain (via htaccess a bulk redirect). All the old pages, without exceptions, lead to the exact new page. The new domain is running from CDN (Cloudflare) with the same settings as the previous domain. SSL is installed in the exact same way. Domain migration set up in Search console (working). Uploaded new sitemap (working). Updated internal links. Changed the most important external links (where I could get contact after reaching out) In meanwhile received some new external links and also posted new content Anybody knows what to do? Or do I just have to be more patient and will it come back in a few months by itself? Looking forward to suggetions. Thanks! Gerjan Migratie-Meditatie-Instituut-2048x786.jpg verloop-sinds-de-start-2048x355.jpg0 -
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 -
Should I redirect images when I migrate my site
We are about to migrate a large website with a fair few images (20,000). At the moment we include images in the sitemap.xml so they are indexed by Google and drive traffic (not sure how I can find out how much though). Current image slugs are like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia
http://website.com/assets/images/a2/65680/thumbnails/638x425-crop.jpg?1402460458 Like on the old site, images on the new website will also have unreadable cache slugs, like:
http://website.com/site_media/media/cache/ce/7a/ce7aeffb1e5bdfc8d4288885c52de8e3.jpg All content pages on the new site will have the same slugs as on the old site. Should I go through the trouble of redirecting all these images?0 -
Combine .com and .co.uk domain? So forward .co.uk to .com for SEO?
Hello, A new client of mine has an .com and an .co.uk domain. Both the same content (and they don't have the capacity to make specific content on both domains). I am thinking building al domain authority to 1 domain. In this case the .com domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
And forward the .co.uk to this .com domain.
In this way, the .com will rank in both UK as in other English speaking countries, right? Or not?
Or should I use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag? I am not sure. But I do know big brands rank high in the Netherlands with .com domains (for example booking.com). Looking forward on feedback on best practices here... Thanks!0 -
Should I buy a .co domain if my preferred .com and .co.uk domain are taken by other companies?
I'm looking to boost my website ranking and drive more traffic to it using a keyword rich domain name. I want to have my nearest city followed by the keyword "seo" in the domain name but the .co.uk and .com have already been taken. Should I take the plunge and buy .co at a higher price? What options do I have? Also whilst we're on domains and URL's is it best to separate keywords in url's with a (_) or a (-)? Many thanks for any help with this matter. Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoSheikh0 -
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 -
Factors that affect Google.com vs .ca
Though my company is based in Canada, we have a .com URL, we're hosted on servers in the U.S., and most of our customers are in the U.S. Our marketing efforts are focused on the U.S. Heck, we even drop the "u" in "colour" and "favour"! 🙂 Nonetheless we rank very well in Google.ca, and rather poorly on Google.com. One hypothesis is that we have more backlinks from .ca domains than .com, but I don't believe that to be true. For sure, the highest quality links we have come from .coms like NYTimes.com. Any suggestions on how we can improve the .com rankings, other than keeping on with the link building?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobM4161
