Moving old .com site to the .co.uk address

How to make the .co.uk as the main URL on the 3 year old .com site

[irekmg]

Hi guys,

We have a three year old site, targeted at the UK audience, however the site is hosted outside the UK and is operating on the .com domain name. Although we have good level of traffic, we obviously miss out on the Google UK searches.

As a solution we are now changing the hosting IP to the UK one and we would like to change the main URL from name.com to name.co.uk. At the moment the .co.uk address redirects to the .com one. Could you please advise what is the best way of doing it? Is there anything else we could do to optimise the site for the UK?

Many thanks!

[encyclo]

From the stories in many threads here on the forums, I wouldn't recommend changing domain names, especially as you are proposing to place the site on a UK IP address. Even with a site-wide 301 Permanent Redirect in place (the approved method) you will most likely suffer for many months at least.

See what happens with the IP address change first (give it six months), and only then consider the possibility of switching to your .co.uk domain.

[waynne]

I did the opposite - moving a .co.uk to a .com. I put a 301 redirect on all the pages via HTACESS and lost my ranking on all internal pages which are now stuck in supplemental. The front page (index) is still ranking well or a little higher than before. I have waited since December 25th and am beginning to think I should just revert back to how I was before (but I'm worried I will just extend the wait and have completely wasted my time).

A better method of moving domain is to set up the .co.uk as the primary domain and MAP the .com to the same webspace. Google seems to recognise sites in this way as a legitimate pair of sites, indeed doing cache: query on a .com name I own brings up the .co.uk cached page.

When DNS resolves and Googlebot picks up the new host you can then do a 301 and hopefully you will not suffer as I have in the last couple of months.

[irekmg]

Many thanks encyclo and waynne!

I did some more search and it looks that the loss of ranking/traffic is unavoidable.

Now I am thinking of building a microsite on the .co.uk name, with different content and site structure and do some natural optimisation for that microsite. If lucky in several months we will have good traffic and then we could move all the .com content there (maybe in stages?), and set up 301 or URL mapping on the .com one.

What do you think?

[futureX]

Sounds like a pretty sound idea, at least then if run into problems with the move you already have traffic and SERPs to fall back on.

[steve]

We moved a .com from US to UK hosting about a year ago for exactly the same reason.

The transition was painless, no noticeable loss of traffic and within a few months we started to show up in the UK serps.

I don't know whether a .co.uk carries any more weight that a .com, as stated above changing could have a negative effect.