Is Anyone Using a .co.uk & .uk?

[RedBar]

I know this applies to all search engines but since Google is so dominant in the UK, this is where it belongs.

I have a keyword.co.uk, niche widget site which does extremely well in the G.co.uk SERPs, all of its product pages rank on the first page with many at #1.

My dilemma is that this site design and css etc is now 14 years old and I really would like to convert this into a responsive html5 site similar to several other sites I have already done.

My html5 site would use a slightly different url structure however the images could remain the same if needs be but I'd rather not do that.

I have example.co.uk and thereby also example.uk, what I would like to do is take the existing site, update any factual information that possibly may need doing, change a few of my images etc and launch it on example.uk BUT basically it would be a duplicate of the .co.uk site.

Has anyone done such a conversion .co.uk > .uk and kept their .co.uk running successfuly?

Yes, I do realise that it's early days for .uk and those companies that may already have done it have deep, deep pockets and are not as product reliant as I am, in fact I would say none of the ones I have seen are product reliant whatsoever whereas I am in a very competitive UK market and probably the leading manufacturing brand for this product.

Obviously, when launched, I could 301 the .co.uk but what the heck would that do for the existing rankings, probably decimate them until Google decides to do a re-run of some magical animal?

Of course I do not have to do this at all, it's just that I'm trying to clean-up sites for the next generation who'll never understand my currrent "old" coding!

Any thoughts, opinions or advice welcomed.

[ronin]

Since your co.uk has built up such good equity, why not build the new site behind

.co.uk/2014/

(disallowing well-behaved crawlers by robots.txt, obviously) and then, when you're ready to switch over, put all the legacy pages behind

.co.uk/2000/

and bring all the .co.uk/2014/ pages to the fore, throwing in any 301s that you have to?

Or is that by

My html5 site would use a slightly different url structure

you don't mean "a couple of pages here and there", but actually folders nested in a different order etc.?

[santapaws]

ive been wondering myself about switching to the .uk on a well indexed site of many years standing. However im not seeing any major .co.uk sites switching to .uk, they dont even seem to be suing the .uk let alone making it the main site or redirecting .uk to .co.uk. Google included. Im not sure what to do with my .uk. It sure would look way better at the customer end and surely down the line all new sites will be .uk.

[RedBar]

Interesting suggestion ronin, I wonder if I could make that work to my advantage? 301'ing all the urls seems the obvious choice and wouldn't be difficult to do, maybe I'm over-thinking this?

but actually folders nested in a different order etc.?

Yep, I'd actually be going from:

example.co.uk/folder/folder/example.html

to

example.uk/example.html

However im not seeing any major .co.uk sites switching to .uk

Obviously the major one is gov.uk, I can't say I've noticeably seen any others.

and surely down the line all new sites will be .uk

My understanding is that .uk and .co.uk will run alongside each other just like all the other .uk prefixes.

[santapaws]

yes im not saying there wont be .co.uk in use, im saying anyone starting a domain now will clearly go with .uk. As that becomes predominant .oc.uk will look old fashioned.

[piatkow]

Maybe, maybe not. The first reaction of many given a .uk name will be to "correct" it to .co.uk

[santapaws]

you think? .co.uk never made any sense to me anyway.

[piatkow]

Based on experience asking people to link to example.co.uk - the great majority actually link to www.example.co.uk

The different layers below .uk made sense if their usage was restricted to their supposed meanings. Once everybody and his dog could buy a .co.uk then the .co became redundant.

[RedBar]

As that becomes predominant .oc.uk will look old fashioned.

See what you get when you type in [google.in...]

They haven't claimed their .uk as yet by the looks of it.

[santapaws]

yes i did actually point that out earlier. I do find it surprising but none of the big sites i have looked at have switched to the.uk or even registered it in many cases.

[graeme_p]

The .co in .co.uk makes sense for the simple reason that it tells you that it is not an .ac or a .gov or any of the restricted domain names.

The opening up of .uk is simply intended to make money for registrars because everyone who has a .co.uk will end up buying the .uk. There is no hurry though - the .uk will be held for a while if you owned the .co.uk before the plain .uk was introduced.

[graeme_p]

Google have registered google.uk (try a whois lookup) but they are not using it. I am sure all the big brands are doing the same.