Moving from .COM to .COM.BR - affect on rankings

[rlopes]

I have a website that receives only Brazilian traffic, and even if it did get any foreign traffic it would be of no use.

I have registered the same name in both TLDs, and until now the .COM.BR version has been 301 redirected to the .COM version.

My question is: should I default it to the .COM.BR version? How would it affect my rankings?

[goodroi]

I am a big fan of "If it is not broken do not fix it".

Do you have any ranking issues? If not I would leave it as is.

[rlopes]

@goodroi
It may not be broken, but it's not great either.
We always want to optimize, don't we?

[aakk9999]

I agree with Goodroi - I would not move UNLESS there is a big bias within Brazilian searches prefering to click on .com.br domains - but even then I would think twice before moving it.

If there is no great bias towards clicking on com.br, then why don't you just geo-target COM site to Brazil via Google Webmaster Tools?

[Nuttakorn]

If you business objective is gain search visibility on Brazil market, you should keep CCTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain) that Google gives good weight on local domain to be ranked well in local search result. Ideally, you can hosted content on your .com but it should have www.yourdomain.com/BR then you can do localization. Then you do 301 redirect from www.yourdomain.com.br to www.yourdomain.com/br