Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The .com was the domain indexed and ranked by Google. The target market for my products is the UK and I have long considered changing to the .co.uk as the default domain.
Previously I had a redirect permanent to point to .co.uk to the .com - in effect I swapped this around.
So I took the plunge and did it. I have contacted a number of the sites which linked to me and asked them to update their links, many of whom already have.
The content and page structure of the .co.uk is identical and the 301 redirects from a .com url to the same url but co.uk
e.g example.com/about.asp redirects to example.co.uk/about.asp
Over the past few days the site has been crawled and Google has been replacing .com urls with .co.uk urls - however the ranking positions have dropped considerably.
For instance the home page when listed as .com ranked page 1 for a few terms, now I have to go to page 15 or 20 to find the site.
I'm beginning to panic and wonder if I've made a big mistake, or unsure whether I should revert to the .com as soon as possible to try and salvage things.
Has anyone got any experience of this and can anyone advise whether I should change back or is it simply a matter of waiting a few more days?
[edited by: tedster at 7:30 pm (utc) on Feb. 22, 2009]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it cannot be owned [/edit]
Previously I had a redirect permanent to point to .co.uk to the .com - in effect I swapped this around.
That's part of the issue. Google will check out 301 redirects rather intensively to ensure that nothing manipulative is going on. This is especially true for 301 redirects that switch direction.
I'm beginning to panic and wonder if I've made a big mistake, or unsure whether I should revert to the .com as soon as possible to try and salvage things....is it simply a matter of waiting a few more days?
In my experience, it may take a few weeks and not days. But trying to switch back again is likely to make things even worse, especially because you have begun asking other sites to change the backlinks. I'd say just let it alone for now, and accept the experience as a learning opportunity.
That's part of the issue. Google will check out 301 redirects rather intensively to ensure that nothing manipulative is going on. This is especially true for 301 redirects that switch direction.
Thanks tedster. The .co.uk never had any links to it previously and the original 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com was put in place just so if people typed in the .co.uk they would get the site.
If googlebot never learned about the old 301, then the current situation should right itself a bit sooner. I wouldn't anticipate immediate recovery to previous rankings - they might appear gradually rather than all at once. Getting old backlinks switched over will help - and getting some NEW backlinks to the .co.uk domain will probably help even more.
Sometimes webmasters do report a very swift and happy ending for changing domains like this. Please keep us posted - it's good to know how these events work out in individual cases.
As far as I'm aware there were no links to the .co.uk
So I'm not sure how this leaves me - am I waiting weeks or months for rankings to return?
If months, maybe I should revert, surely its not too late after only a few days?
We have 7-year old com and hr domains where for the last 18 months com domain has been 302-ed to hr domain. Prior to that time com domain was used and hr domain was parked.
Over the last 18 months all links that existed to com domain have been attributed to hr domain by Google. In a meantime, there has been a number of new links that point to hr domain directly.
About 3 weeks ago we have removed 302 from com to hr and both domains are now running separately as a mirror sites - we are waiting for SSL to be installed on com domain to do 301 from hr to com.
Initially, after we removed 302, searching for com domain name in Google would return hr domain and com domain was nowhere to be seen. Three weeks down the track, when searching for www.example.com, the #1 result is still www.example.hr domain, but at position 3 & 4 we are seeing com domain pages, but only these pages which were not previously indexed on hr domain and have in a meantime been found on com domain.
Both domains reside on the same server and both domains are in the same webmaster tools account.
We expect SSL to be installed during this coming week when we will do page-to-page 301 from hr to com and at which point we will email to whoever we can to change all links to hr domain to point to com domain. We are hoping that after that the existing links to com domain will start to count too.
I will let you know our results and whether we will drop in ranking and how long for.
The best advice (sorry to offer it so late) is to switch pages over several months, ie everyday a few more pages change domain.
This means a completely dynamic site, as all the internal links must switch at the same time.
Not sure if the homepage should be done first or last, though.
Sitemaps is the only thing which might help you right now. That and brandy, lots of brandy! ;)
In the meantime I would register both www and non-www for both .com and .co.uk (that's four in all) for Google WebmasterTools and keep an eye on the spidering levels for each.
Another possible problem is the rate of new links pointing to the site at its new domain. You could be on probation until Google is satisfied you're not doing something unethical.
> I have contacted a number of the sites which linked to me and asked them to update their links, many of whom already have.
Many but not all? It's possible then Google sees fewer inbound links, and therefore lowers ranking, even if it gives you a pass on the redirect. If every good link to your site helps ranking, any drop will lower your ranking. This is possibly one of the biggest reasons not to change domains, at least when you can't get ahold of the webmasters who gave you great links in the past.
Further, there are some theories about ranking related to inbound links to internal pages. Tedster would know more about this than I do, but you may want to look into it more if you're trying to transfer link juice from your old domain to the new one.
p/g
Full site redirect (page to page basis, identical URLs apart from TLD extension) was done on 27th Feb, so just over a week ago.
A few days after 301, we also managed to change some of existing backlinks from HR domain to COM domain (the others are in the pipeline, requests sent).
No link building exercise done yet for COM domain (this is about to start slowly next week).
RESULTS SO FAR:
Of the three main english keywords for which the HR domain home page was ranking on the first page of google.com SERPS, two of them preserved their ranking (#6 and #7), now showing the COM domain home page instead.
The third keyword fell from #6 to #19 initially, but today it climbed back to #15. This third keyword is the most competitive of all three, returning just under 2 milion results.
With regards to other languages in their respective google.xx (the site runs in 6 languages), all of pages that were crawled and changed to COM either preserved their rank or climbed up a bit (rougly 10%ish up).
Only one language dropped in SERPS, which is the language previously geo-targeted owing to hr domain TLD (this was fully expected and not a big deal for the client).
So far we are very pleased with results, especially as some significant changes to the site were done in the last 3 months leading to the 301 swap and we had no idea what to expect.
We are guessing that the fact the client owned both domains for 8 years and that both domains were operational at one time or the other in the last 8 years (i.e. not just parked) has helped a lot as google must have a history for both domains somewhere.
