Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have two domains, .com and .hr and both are old domains registered to the same WhoIs since 2001.
Up to 2007 .COM domain was used and .HR was just pointed to COM. In 2007 the complete site was redesigned and at that time a decision had been made to use .HR domain and change home language to Croatian. At the same time .COM home page was 302-ed to .HR but internal pages were not redirected.
I should add that both, COM and HR had been running from the same web space, same hosting provider and have had the same content, and apart from TLD the URLs are exactly the same but in SERPS only .HR domain appeared. Both domains are also in Webmaster tools and both domains run the same Google Analytics urchin.
Owing to geo targeting, which is fixed to Croatia for HR domain, the client wants to move back to .COM domain and change home language to English. Switch to .COM domain is needed so that the domain would rank better worldwide.
So far we have removed 302 from .COM domain and switched the home language to English, which resulted in .HR domain starting to rank for English keywords. We have also added .COM domain to Webmaster tools under the same user id.
We are now waiting for SSL certificate for .COM domain (should be installed next week) and then what is left to do is to 301 .HR domain to .COM on a page by page basis.
The problem is that we will have to do it in one big hit rather than little by little because of SSL and sessions (it is e-commerce site so we cannot re-direct some directories or pages and not the others as then we lose session id information when jumping between domains).
Would you recommend to do 301 as soon as we get a SSL installed for COM domain or to run two domains in parallel for a couple of months each with own SSL?
What would be the best way to minimise ranking loss? And has anyone ever moved domains where both domains have been active for a number of years (rather than moving to a brand new domain name).
Looking at Google Webmaster tools statistics, we can see that .COM domain was not really spidered at all until couple of weeks ago when we removed home page 302, at which point Google has started to spider it big time.
Another observation - searching for "www.example.COM" in Google returns home page of www.example.HR as #1 in SERPS. Whilst there was 302 in place on the home page of .COM domain, none of .COM pages would show at all in results when searching for .COM domain. Once we removed 302, then one of internal pages of .COM domain is returned at number #6, but the first entry in SERPS is still .HR domain despite search being for the exact name of .COM domain. So obviously Google somehow sees .COM doman as .HR domain?
Can anybody recommend when is the best to do 301 or any other best course of action here?
Google has made various "associations" that can take 6 months or more to undo. The 302 redirects have also muddied the waters.
Changing the redirects to be the opposite direction to what they were a while ago is also going to confuse the bots to some extent.
Why don't you have two sites with the .com in English and .hr in local language?
It is absolutely 'normal' to have multiple sites for multiple languages, and you are not doing anything 'wrong' by doing so. Why not *use* both domains?
Avoid serving the same language-content for both domains; If you don't have a page in the 'correct' language for the domain, it would be acceptable to link to the other domain as long as you inform your visitors that the language is different (this is primarily a usability factor).
Over time, the goal would be to have two sites; One for each language and 'market' (In other words, you might emphasize somewhat different things on each of the two sites, based on cultural and market differences).
Jim
The site was SEO nightmare. Lots of javascript, duplicate URLs, very long URLs with many many parameters, never got crawled properly. Over 300 duplicate titles and descriptions, the sitemap submitted had only .jpg links in there - in other words, whilst pleasant on design and easy to navigate, there were no thoughts on SEO during design AT ALL. Consequently, the site did not rank for anything in neither of languages (it runs in 6 languages, so it is more to it than just Croatian and English).
We took over SEO couple of months ago but the coding changes have to be done by the Web Studio that designed the site. They own and host the database and that database is used by Web Studio other clients who were sold the same package (I believe there are about 6-7 clients), basically all of their clients data is in the same database - bad!. Back end of the application is the same for all clients. So we are a bit limited on what we can do as other clients might get affected. So we write specs for SEO changes and these go to Web studio and they implement them.
Anyway, we managed to get rid of javascript in URL and got rid of lots of 302 redirects, which for the first time allowed for the site to be crawled properly. We sorted titles and descriptions (600 pages x 6 languages!) and the site started to rank for Croatian keywords, but the client is not interested in Croatian market as their market is worldwide.
We then asked for the home language to be changed to english and the HR site started to rank reasonably for target English keywords, making jumps such as from 138 to 11, and for one keyword even from 300 to 8 (shows the power of the old site!). And this is before any backlinks work, which is in the pipeline to be done. HR site has only about 25 backlinks and COM site maybe 5-6 historical ones.
Now you can imagine that the client is very reluctant to just leave HR site in Croatian and starts from scratch with COM site for english keywords as croatian is not the market they target anyway, and HR site has started to rank well for english words.
So what we want to do is to leave HR site in English whilst building links to COM site and making its ranking improve. At one point when for at least main english keywords, COM comes on radar, we would either do 301 from HR site and run everything from COM site or do what g1smd and jdMorgan suggested, which is to revert home language on HR site back to HR at that point and have COM site running other languages, most likely with english as a main language and subfolders for /de/ /it/ etc for other languages.
As I said, the client does not want to revert HR site to Croatian now that is ranking reasonably (and even well for some keywords) for english, but they do want to use COM site otherwise other languages they have will never rank well running from HR site (and no, despite visible improvement, other languages do not rank at the moment despite cleaning up titles, descriptions and URLs).
So what we are trying to achieve is to keep good ranking on HR site whilst COM takes over, and at that point sort out other languages, with Croatian itself being the lowest priority in ranking.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:37 pm (utc) on Jan. 25, 2009]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
HR site is PR6, it has been registered in 2001. COM site was also registered in 2001 to the same owner. We believe COM site to be PR3 on the home page (looking at Google webmaster tools) but currently all we see for COM site is PR6 owing to 302 redirect that was in place.
With regards to ranking, whilst it is not "top 5", it jumped to the first page for the four of keywords, top of the 2nd page for the next 3 keywords and vastly improved for the last three keywords. I should add that the site always had 6 language, english being one of them, so I guess Google was aware of it.
Also, switching the home language in english really only affected the URL without language parameter - the way the site was set up is to have one page for each of the languages which had lang= parameter, and then the same URL without lang parameter for the "home" language. So, all pages with lang= parameter are exactly the same (6 variants of them, one for each language), all that we changed is what language gets displayed when there is no lang parameter in URL - it used to be Croatian and now it is English.
I know there is dup content between "home" language and the same page with lang= parameter of the home language and once Google indexes all pages with english I will stop lang=en in robots.txt, but for now half of pages that have no lang= parameter are indexed in english and other half is still in croatian.
I will keep my fingers crossed for quality signals - the hosting provider is the same, whois did not change, COM site was added to the same user in Webmaster Tools, do not know what else I can do.
The problem is that the site was so messed up that "little by little" approach just would not work or it would take for ever - it needed a better baseline and as it did not rank before we figured out we had nothing much to lose.
Day 1: Change to English
Day 2: Site ranking vastly improved for english key phrases
Day 4: Site ranking revert back for english keywords. Inspection showed that although the CACHED page was in english, the title and description shown in SERPS reverted back to Croatian (and the site was still in english!) It was almost like Google decided - hey, you made a mistake, I am showing Croatian titles and descriptions instead (but its cached page was ENGLISH)
Day 6: Google SERPS show english titles and descriptions and the site again showed vastly improved ranking on Google.com site, even better ranking than Day 2.
Now the ranking keep improving little by little with Cro ranking slipping (expected).
