Can I move hosting from .com to .co.uk without Google consequenses?

[Washerhelp]

I have a site hosted at a .com domain which I have owned for over 6 years. After a couple of years I bought the .co.uk domain and had it parked and pointing to the original well established .com site.

I'm now changing hosting companies and have the oportunity to reverse the situation so that the pages are hosted at the .co.uk domain and the .com version is parked and pointing to .co.uk. This is because my site is aimed at UK visitors and most of my inbound links are to the .co.uk version.

Can anyone see any Google consequences of reversing this situation? I'm particulary concerned that the site has been hosted at the .com domain for over 2 years longer than the .co.uk so it's got the advantage of being older, but then all my internal links are .co.uk so they are all redirected to .com

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I think this could be dangerous in the short term but perhaps someone who knows more about it can explain the consequences?

[WebWalla]

If your .com is better known in the market and has more external links I would do the following :-

- keep .com
- change to a UK host
- change all .co.uk links to .com

The change of host will give you the boost in rankings for UK sites in google.co.uk and the fact that you keep the .com means you won't lose rankings because of all the links pointing there.

The other possibility is to do a 301 from .com to .co.uk,. but personally I prefer the other route because I never fully trust how the SE's deal with 301's.

[g1smd]

When you say that the .co.uk domain pointed at the .com site, do you mean that both .com and .co.uk return a 200 OK for the same content; or did one of them return a 301 status?

If both return 200 OK then that is duplicate content, but will be easy to fix - by changing one to be a site-wide 301 redirect.

If one was already a 301 redirect, then you will need to reverse the direction of the redirect - and that will probably be a disaster for your rankings for very many months.

A "UK site" is one that has either a .co.uk domain hosted anywhere or has any TLD but is hosted in the UK - or has both a .co.uk domain and UK hosting.

[Washerhelp]

My current host has "mirrored" the .co.uk site which meant it was duplicated. Apparently both tld's return a 200 OK. However, Google knows that the .co.uk domain is my main one because I made all internal links absolute and pointing to .co.uk, plus virtualy all inbound links are to the .co.uk domain. I rank very highly for "washing machine" related searches in Google.com and Google.co.uk but Google always appears to return my .co.uk domain and I think it's dropped the .com

Does this not mean that I can re-host my pages on the new host at the .co.uk domain and Google won't think anything of it? And I can just set the .com domain to permanently redirect to .co.uk without any adverse Google effect?

[M_Bison]

I've always wanted to get rid of my .com and 301 it to my .com.au.

Alas, this would spell disaster for my search rankings.

I dream of a day where Google has a simple form in their webmaster tools where we can just tell them we are moving URLs. A lot like telling banks etc you are moving house.

[Simsi]

do you mean that both .com and .co.uk return a 200 OK for the same content; or did one of them return a 301 status?

Maybe a silly question, but having a similar scenario, how do you find out whether the returning code is 200 or 301?

[g1smd]

Use the Live HTTP Headers Extension for Mozilla, SeaMonkey and FireFox.

OR

Get a copy of WebBug, but DO make sure that you ALWAYS select HTTP/1.1 for the tests.