Moving A Site From .com to biz/info/eu or asia?

[HuskyPup]

I have an interesting scenario about to occur and wondered what others here would do in similar circumstances?

For several months a genuine purchaser has wanted to buy my company domain name example.com and has now come up with an acceptable offer therefore I will shortly be faced with moving example.com to a new home. I already own example in 12 different extensions with the following being available for immediate use - biz/info/eu.

I also own the four letter company acronym in several extensions including .net, the .com is not for sale.

We do a lot of business througout Asia, both production and sales, and it just so happens that I own the keyword.asia for my seven main categories and have considered the idea of splitting the site over the seven domains giving me the opportunity to expand each category even further and more focussed.

For company marketing purposes I am not overly concerned about not having the .com, that site generally tends to generate a lot of price comparison requests, especially from the USA, whereas our .in easily out-performs all the others with enquiries and confirmed orders.

One concern I do have is how Google may treat this site if I were to move to a ccTLD such as .eu?

My example.asia does have a site on it and I am not worried about moving it since it would go perfectly on my spare example.co.in however does anyone have any idea of the consquences of moving two sites like this. If both the domains were empty I wouldn't be concerned since I have done this before but moving an established example.com to an established example.asia is disconcerting.

You have probably noticed that I haven't mention the .biz and .info...I'm not overly keen on these two extensions from an aesthetic point of view.

What do you think?

[tedster]

If you need the US maarket, then you can't depend on .eu and .asia - you will probably want an international TLD in addition to those ccTLDs. Google will tend not to serve those country-code domains in the US results.

A .net works well enough if you want to avoid the .info and .biz "stigma". Also you can essentially duplicate some content across different ccTLDs, although it does pay to localize it as much as possible.

[Robert Charlton]

This is going to be different from a normal "move", in that you will not be retaining your original domain, so you won't be able to redirect your accrued inbound linking reputation. I feel that you need to consider how you're going to handle this transition, therefore, as well as your eventual TLD(s).

I assume that the value you see in the other TLD variants is that they contain either a keyword and/or branding term. Yes, if you have the .net, use it. I've had one client with a .biz that we made work. Beyond stigma, .info domains are the source of so much email spam that I'd rule them out, even though you might be able to make a .info rank. I have no experience with .us, but there's no Google reason why that wouldn't work for the USA version.

I definitely would take careful notes on your current inbound links and do what's possible to get them switched over when you move.

Also, I'd try to work some deal with the purchaser to give you a buffer period that you could use for restablishing the new sites while redirecting inbounds from the .com. Once you've given up the ability to redirect the domain, your inbound links evaporate. It's not clear whether the purchaser is aware of those inbounds, though, and is hoping to hang onto them.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

As Robert mentioned, redirect should be your major cause of worry.
You should (if not) negotiate for a buffer time.
In the past we had to give up one of our domains but we took a buffer of 3 months in which we
1. setup redirects at page level from old domain
2. try to contact as many webmasters to get the inbound linking changed.

More or less it worked pretty well with almost 70-80% traffic retention.

[HuskyPup]

The US market for the last 30 years we have always dealt direct from the factories therefore that's not a concern for us, interestingly our .in and .asia sites rank extremely well in the US SERPs.

I don't know how common this is however many in my trade are used to using Google.ccTLDs for sourcing products, it's something that's always been done way before the WWW etc.

Insofar as a .us is concerned I do have the brand however they have to be hosted on a US server however that may be a good idea the more I think about it.

We have agreed a 3 month transition which ought to give me enough time to get the backlinks etc sorted out, actually I'm more concerned with e-mail notifications for all sorts of things like domain name renewals etc.

The purchaser is totally non-related to my industry, it is for a specific governmental/university project and I did offer them other extensions but they're insisting it's the .com or nothing! It is a significant sum otherwise I would not even have considered it and they've known that from the very start

With my experience a couple of months ago of a very fast complete domain move I'm reasonably convinced the move will be pretty smooth, my biggest decision has to be which extension to use.

[goodroi]

this is a really great question.

i agree with the advice above. i will also suggest that whatever domain extension you go with, you probably want to you have a plan for immediately sending social quality signals. i'm talking about twitter mentions, facebook fanpages etc.