Changing from .co.uk to .com site...?

What's the best way re: SEO

[yump]

I'm sure this question has been asked before but can't find anything at the moment. Can anyone help please.

We have a well-known niche (trading) site running as a .co.uk. Many of the pages rank highly for all sorts of keywords and have done for the last few years.

We've got about 30% non UK visitors, but they are not very active. We are thinking of changing to the .com domain (which we have) to make it feel more international and hopefully get more business.

Puzzling over how to move to the .com without messing up the page rankings? Do we just do a divert on all the pages that rank highly?

[jetboy_70]

Two things to consider before you do this:

1. While changing to .com may make your business seem more global, it will also undermine the fact that you're a UK business. While your overseas sales may increase, your UK sales may also decrease as a result.

2. If overseas visitors are actually making it to your site, then they've overcome the hurdle of your domain name. Surely a better approach would be to state more clearly on the site that you ship overseas and that your shipping fees are competitive.

It's probable that you're just getting less activity from overseas traffic just because of your physical location. If so, neither a domain change or an on-page copy change is going to have much of an impact.

Also consider that if you are not hosted in the UK, switching from a .co.uk to a .com will drop you out of Google's regional SERPs.

If after all of that you still want to go ahead then set up the .com as your main domain, and set up requests to .co.uk pages to do a 301 permanent redirect to their .com equivalents.

[The Contractor]

And don't expect to rank for the next 6-months in Google if this is a new domain...;)

[yump]

Thanks for replying.
Actually the fact that non-UK visitors are coming to the site anyway is a point we hadn't really thought of. Its actually a classifieds site, so we don't ship anything - just thinking the 'formula' we've got would work internationally, as there aren't any other sites doing it.

Which makes me think we would be better just giving visitors the choice when they arrive of 'if you want our international .com site please go to.....'

Then presumably as long as we don't duplicate pages, should be in the clear.

[johnnie]

Why *move*?

Have you considered using simple DNS record to make yoursite.com a simple alias of yoursite.co.uk (which means: they share the same IP address)? Any ISP will do that for you.

That way you can have both :)

[Dave_A]

If I were you I would register the new .com domain and get your host to point it at the same account.
It might look like a mirror site but most Search engines would be okay with that.
The .co.uk would allow people to know what country your from and the .com could originate from anywhere but if your contact details are available on the web site it wouldn't be a problem.
I run a search engine down in New Zealand and if .com domains come in for indexing we always check the origins of the domain, mostly because we only index NZ based web sites or web sites with content that is of interest to Kiwi's which can leave the door quite wide open.

[jetboy_70]

most Search engines would be okay with that

If you are suggesting having two domains, both pointing to the same content, both returning 200 OKs for page requests, then most search engines will *not* be okay with that. Google in particular will make your life a misery.

[yump]

The duplicate page/site question seems pretty complex, judging by other threads, so am keen to avoid it if at all possible, especially as we have a nice income from Adsense.