realwahl - 1:30 pm on Mar 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

I searched and found some topics about this on webmasterworld, but they are very old so they may be deprecated. That's why I open a new topic.

I have a well established multi-language website and I noticed that local domain names (like my_domain.co.uk) are better then global ones (like my_domain.com). I think they rank better in SERPs and users tend to click more on a local website. Moreover, I think users remember easier local domains and are more likely to return&link to me.

I intend to move one language of this website onto a new domain. I was thinking to do 301 redirects from all old pages to all new pages and of course update the sitemaps accordingly. This way, Google should understand that my pages changed location and will index the new ones. But, it will probably exclude my webpages from SERPs, at least for a period.

Do you think that a few local domains are better then one big international domain in this case?
How can I do this move, in order to make it as painless as possible for my site?

Thanks!

[edited by: tedster at 6:02 pm (utc) on Mar 25, 2011]
[edit reason] repair format problem [/edit]