Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have a domain www.example.com (hosted in the US) which directs the users to us.example.com (hosted in the US) when browsed from a US IP while goes to www.example.co.uk (hosted in UK) when clicked through a UK IP address.
We are now moving .co.uk to .com domain simply because the .com has a good Page Rank compared to .co.uk and .com has good brand value in UK. For this we will ensure:
1. 301 Redirect from all .co.uk pages to corresponding pages on .com
2. We are planning to operate both the sites from next 6 months to ensure proper redirection. Is this fine?
3. Should we redirect the URL www.example.co.uk to www.example.com as 302 or should this be 301 only? (Remember we have a higher PR for .com that we do not want to come down).
Also, we have a DNS service that is currently giving a UK IP address for www.example.com when pinged from UK while it gives a US IP when done from US.
Is this a major issue and should be resolved? If yes then please advice how should we go about the same.
Thanks in advance.
-Ankit
Different IP addresses by geolocation should not cause a problem. All kinds of load-balancing schemas (including Google's own) assign different IP addresses to a domain in different situations. It's the domain name that gets indexed - unless some bozo links to your site using the IP address, of course. For those situations it's best to have a rewrite rule in place to avoid duplicate indexing and splitting link juice.
So this means we do not need to worry about the IP thing. This is great.
