Is it safe to move a .Com to .Com.Au?

Any help would be awsome.

[davegamer]

Hi All,

Recently google.com.au has dropped my pages from its searches. Even tho google tell me im not and its a page rank thing. I think they are full of it. As some of my links are first in the world on google.com and come nowhere in .au searches.

So I am thinking of moving my .com to a .com.au domain.

Are there any big problems I should know about before doing this?

Was going to move the site to the .com.au domain and use the .com as a alias to still bring in traffic from old links in google etc. Would this be a safe way to go?

Any advice on this would be awsome

Thanks in advance,
Dave

[leadegroot]

Google.com.au results should be identical to google.com results *except* where the visitor has selected 'pages from Australia'
In that case, they only get results which either have a .au domain or are hosted on an Australian IP.
If you have changed hosting to overseas recently this would explain it.

No real problem changing from a .com to .com.au - you may take a hit in the SERPs for a few months while the new domain is in the sandbox. Or not - I have had good luck that way with some .au domains recently.

Do a 301 from the .com to the .com.au and all the pagerank should pass across (note; this is different to parking it!)

[davegamer]

Hey leadegroot,

Nah it looks like google has done something to drop a lot of .com domains from its search.

Wondering what is the better way to do this.

Run the two seperate sites off the one database?

Or just run the .com.au site and have .com as the alias?

Dave

[leadegroot]

Do the .com as an alias - otherwise you'll get dupe page filtering and weird stuff happening.

[jcmiras]

leadegroot said...
"Do a 301 from the .com to the .com.au and all the pagerank should pass across (note; this is different to parking it!)"

Just to clarify, if this is true, why does google.com and google.com.au has different pagerank?

[leadegroot]

Because they are different sites.
There is no 301 between the 2.
Hint: if you 301 from site A to site B then when someone types site A into the browser the url displayed will change to site B.

[jcmiras]

ok. Does it mean that to 301 A.com to A.com.au, i have to buy domain A.com.au or 301 does it all for me.

[leadegroot]

Well of course you have to buy the .com.au.
Why one earth would you move your traffic to a domain that doesn't exist or belongs to someone else?

(Note, only Australian registered business entities, plus a few special cases, can buy .com.au domains. Its not open slather like .com)