3 year old site domain name restructure

impact on google serps

[Belhomme]

Hi,

I have a site with very good results in google for lots of keywords! This is a site in 2 languages.

The serps are all based on the .be (belgium) domain name.
What we want to do now is do a restructure.

the .be should go to the dutch part of the site (instead to the english part) and the .co.uk domain name should direct to the english part. Thus changing the entire site domainname pages.

Both domainnames are in use at the moment but both direct to the root (english part), so the only change would be the .be redirect. could this hurt us? Do not forget that all traffic from google comes from .be because this is our main serps listing.

[muesli]

welcome to webmasterworld.

shouldn't be a problem. google will quickly pick up the changes. your english traffic will probably drop but then soon regain.

just make sure to install proper "permanently moved"-redirects from your english-speaking .be-subpages to the equivalent .co.uk-pages.

[Belhomme]

can't i just:

redirect the .be domainname to the dutch part of the site.

Google will see the change on every page, next time they visit the url in their index.

They will notice the language change, notice that suddenly, .co.uk is different from .be and thus reward the co.uk with higer serps for the english part.

and maybe in the process reward the .be for it being in dutch now instead of english.

[muesli]

depends on how your structure is now. i was assuming the following:

example.be -> mixed

example.be/ned/products -> dutch

example.be/eng/products -> english

i that case you do:

example.be -> dutch, prominent linking to example.co.uk

example.be/ned/products -> don't touch or redirect to example.be/products

example.be/eng/products -> redirect to example.co.uk/products

if you have mixed languages on every page then of course redirects don't make sense.

[Powdork]

Keep in mind that google is having problems handling 301's correctly now. I redirected a directory from one site to a new domain and google handled some page correctly but others not. For some pages they now have a supplemental result on the old domain and a url listing on the new.
Also keep in mind that while this is a completely different scenario from what you are doing, I lost all my Google traffic because the new domain is in the sandbox. If you have substantial Google traffic that is important to you I would be VERY certain this isn't going to put you in the sandbox before doing any major domain restructuring. This thread [webmasterworld.com] has a bit more on the 301 problems.

[Belhomme]

our structure now:
# example.be -> English (should become example.co.uk)
# example.be/nl/ -> dutch (should become example.be)

at the moment example.be and example.co.uk is both going to example.be -> English.

thus only redirecting example.be to example.be/nl/ will be the restructure.