country domain to .com

[santapaws]

established country domain website (10 years). Its been running with the .com 301'd to the country specific version all this time. The site now appears geographically tied to the country extension in google but it sells worldwide its country specific widget (if that makes sense). Im wondering on the benefits and the negatives of turning this around and running on the .com with the country extension 301'd to the .com. The country extension does have a good number of natural backlinks gathered over the years. The site is hosted is also hosted on the country specific extension.

[goodroi]

May I suggest an alternative - keep the country domain and launch a new site on the .com

[santapaws]

not really an option. Its hard enough maintaining the content on that one site let alone running two sites for the same niche side by side.

[tedster]

Historically, reversing the direction of a 301 redirect has generated a longer period of trust checking (and lost traffic) than just establishing a new domain - sometimes many months. I have no recent experience I can reference on that, however, and 301 handling for trusted businesses has certainly become speedier.

The obvious benefit, once Google "accepts" the change would be the chance for more internationally targeted traffic. You said the site has good backlinks - are they geographically diverse? I have a sense that would help speed the transition period. So would hosting the .com domain outside the original country.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I agree with Tedster, migrating to the .com and preferably with a host outside the original country would be desirable.

As for running two sites, you don't have to. You can set up a mirror of your site on the .com that is blocked from being indexed or searched and make sure it works as intended. When you're satisfied simply flip the switch so to speak and have all requests for a page 301 redirect to the .com version and remove the block. You can do this without creating new databases and such, I'd look into it.

[santapaws]

so remove the 301 redirect now. have requests for the country specific go to a mirror on the .com. Well that would be pretty easy so how does that benefit over an immediate switch now in reversing the redirects? is it just to give a period of no redirects? How sites on different ips/servers/countries?

ted, the original backlinks were diverse but over the years as google narrowed its geographical targeting the links are more country specific.

tx for the suggestions.

[aakk9999]

I have done this for a client in 2009 and it took only one month to sort itself out, and since then .com domain ranking really improved in non-host countries + we could employ geo targeting for other language versions which we could not do before.

But I think we had some factors going for a swift and painless changes:

1) Previously the .com was using 302 redirect to .ccTLD (and not 301 redirect) which I believe made the introduction of 301 other way around easier

2) Both domains had the same WhoIs, and shared the same IP for 7+ years back (which I think helped with the issue of trust)

So if your WhoIs is the same for both domains, if they currently use the same IP and if you have owned both for some period of time, then all these things should go in your favour.

But regardless, I think that even if you have short term seatbacks, long term gains are worth it.

<added>
- We did not run mirrors in parallel. We just went for a one-off switch.
- The links to client site were also skewed towards host country.
- After the switch we did approach a bunch of most important sites that linked to the ccTLD domain and asked them to change the link to .com domain.
- We also submitted a new sitemap.xml, and removed the ccTLD sitemap.xml
- We also added both domains to the same WMT account few months before the switch
- After the switch the SERPs dropped only a few places, to fully recover within six weeks or so.
- We saw SERPs flicking back between old/new domain for a few weeks after the switch - Google ranked the new domain, then reverted ranking old domain URL for a week or so, then flicked back to the new domain in SERPs
- Traffic was not affected much as we did the switch during quiet months out of season (it is an e-com site)
- Also would like to add that the domain size was approx 3000 pages at the time of switch - Google sorting URLs out may take longer for larger sites
</added>

<added #2>
I would not change hosting of the .com in the same time of doing the switch. I would first just remove redirect, and have .com serve the content from whichever IP it was up to now responding to 301 redirect and introduce 301 to .ccTLD. Basically leave each of them on the same IP they currently have.

Only after Google gets your pages to switch and the domain stabilises, then I would consider what is the best country to host .com domain.

I think this would help with the trust during the switch.
</added #2>

[santapaws]

thank you for the food for thought. Both domains have always been on the same ip and server but the .com had been on proxy whois even though they were both the same owner. That has now been rectified.

[santapaws]

i also wonder how to handle the internal redirects. All the internal 301's where pages have moved etc. This will now be a daisy chain, well 2 hops as oppose to one. Just leave it all as is and just switch the domain redirect?

[aakk9999]

All your internal pages must change URLs to go to a redirected page in one hit. Do not have internal 301s, it signals the bad site quality.

As soon as you do the switch, change all your internal 301s to point to the correct URL on the new domain (in one hit)

[santapaws]

sorry i dont quite follow that. Perhaps i didnt explain correctly. For instance, take the example of where page1, page2, page3 were improved and collated into one url, page4.htm.
Now country domain has 301 redirect from page1.htm to page4.htm. There are external links we have no control of to some of the old pages, thus wanting to keep the 301's.
So if i just 301 country extension to .com there are 2 redirects, country > page1 > page4.
The alternative is before the country domain 301 have page level redirects for old internal 301's.
So 301 countrypage1 > .compage4 is just one hop.
Is this worth doing or complicates things?

[mark_roach]

The alternative is before the country domain 301 have page level redirects for old internal 301's.
So 301 countrypage1 > .compage4 is just one hop.
Is this worth doing or complicates things?

That is exactly what you must do.

example.tld/page1 -> example.com/page4 in one hop

not

example.tld/page1 -> example.tld/page4 -> example.com/page4 in two hops

If you are running apache look in the apache [webmasterworld.com] forum for plenty of examples on how to do this.