Shifting domain from .IN to .Com

[Rockzer]

Hello All,

I need rays of lights on moving my domain from .IN to .Com. I would like to know the drawbacks of the same. Some of my friends told me shifting from .IN to .Com I am going to gain traffic. But some people told me it may also have bad effect If I gain ill be gain or else I may lose my 90% traffic also.

Can you please help me with your suggestion.

[Rob_Banks]

If you move a site from .IN to .com you will want to make sure you have redirects in place to make sure all pages properly redirect from .in to .com
Improved traffic due to tld? Probably isn't going to make a difference, content is more critical than .in or .com.

Let's see if this post sticks, my last post, while well on topic, seemed to have been nuked by overzealous mods.
Nice lipstick on the forum though.

[RedBar]

Which is your primary target market, India or global?

Will you be using English spellings or US, I assume English?

Try testing Google.co.in with a few English v US spellings and you will soon see what I mean.

[rainborick]

Changing your domain name from the Country Code Top Level Domain ('ccTLD') 'in' to the generic TLD '.com' can have a major impact on your site because it controls your site's geo-location. The '.in' ccTLD fixes your geo-location to India, which means that currently, your pages are very unlikely to be shown to users in other countries in the search results. Changing to the generic '.com' domain means other factors control geo-location. By default, the geo-location of generic TLDs (.com, .net, .org, .info, etc.) is largely determined by the physical location of the server that hosts the site, based on its IP address. Other factors like the geo-location of links that point to the site also have some influence on geo-location for generic TLDs.

Both Google and Bing allow webmasters to adjust the geo-location setting through their Webmaster tools, even allowing webmasters to set different targets for specified directories or sub-domains. So, the '.com' will give you more options in this regard, but you need to be aware of the influence of geo-location on your site's performance before making the change. The best choice will depend on where in the world your target audience resides.

[RedBar]

The '.in' ccTLD fixes your geo-location to India, which means that currently, your pages are very unlikely to be shown to users in other countries in the search results.

Incorrect, I have .in sites that rank well for English language queries in all Google SERPs.

[Rockzer]

Thanks for your replies guys, My targetted audience is from India and USA. I have nearing 30% traffic from USA and 25% traffic from India. I want to redirect the site from. IN to .Com to get more traffic from other countries as well.

[aakk9999]

Is your site only in English?

[rainborick]

Check out Google's advice for Multi-Regional Sites [support.google.com] and Country Targeting [support.google.com].

[Rockzer]

Yeah my site is English only, I just want to changing from .IN to .COM is going to hamper my ranking and my traffic ?

[tangor]

Any change will have an impact. Maybe bad, maybe good. You'll have to do it to see what actually happens. that's not the answer you want. We can't give you that answer.

Historically, however, .com addresses embrace more traffic than country tlds. If traffic is the desire, then go for it. Just keep the .IN in effect forever (keep paying it, keep the site there, just don't update it) and redirect all your existing pages to the .com.

In general, most folks do okay, some do great, few regret it or see a loss.

[Rockzer]

Hello Tangor,

Thanks for your suggestion, basically it cant hamper my ranking or it may boost up as well. Can you please explain me what do you mean by this statement ?

Just keep the .IN in effect forever (keep paying it, keep the site there, just don't update it) and redirect all your existing pages to the .com ?

[RedBar]

I have nearing 30% traffic from USA and 25% traffic from India.

Is your site mobile friendly?

All my .in sites are and my main one has 51% mobile phone traffic alone and they are a major reference source for my entire Indian widget industry.

FWIW Google.co.in for my industry serves up as much results garbage as it does for many other Google.tlds, you will find them 50/50, either acceptable or US-centric and pointless.

[tangor]

Can you please explain me what do you mean by this statement?

Maintain the ..IN forever. Redirect those pages to the same pages on the .COM site... or at least until you get no more redirects and that might be years down the line. You don't want to lose any of your existing traffic when you make the change.

For more info see: [webmasterworld.com...] for some examples of how this might be done with Apache. It will also provide a guideline for other server technologies if your current host is not on Apache.