Migrating Established Community from .co.uk Domain to gTLD

[rutteger]

After some advice and thoughts on this one.

Have a well established community on a .co.uk domain name, something like vintagebike.co.uk.

The community is mainly uk focussed but equally has members worldwide. Always felt the .co.uk helped the uk members but put non-UK members off over the years. Tried for .com at various times but missed out at auction well over ten years ago and the price from the current owner only goes up.

With the new gtld release purchased vintage.bike however many years ago it was. Only setup as a redirect currently, however currenlty considering moving the domain lock and stock to this domain name.

Should I leave well alone or will the gtld benefit long term. Not done much with the site for too long, plan a big refresh of which this could be a core part.

[Marketing Guy]

A refresh + potentially wider audience = could get pretty good results.

Perhaps minor disruption to your organic post launch but assuming all the old > new redirects are in place, etc, then things should work out nicely. There's no inherent (SEO) value in the new tlds, but no down side either. A blank slate, so if it's more brandable, then there's an argument to be made to go for it.

[RedBar]

The problem you may have could be Google's obsession with localisation these days. Even though my sites have been around since the 90s, are corporate and global, Google has slashed my USA visitors by 80+% to the extent whereby some days I get more UK traffic than USA even though the US market for my products is at least 25X the UK.

Needless to say, Google is almost totally useless for me nowadays.

[rutteger]

Thanks for the responses. Two interesting opinions and having read up further there seems to be a fair bit of conflicting advice regarding the use of a gtld vs ccdld. Decisions, decisions!