Tell me more ×
Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for pro webmasters. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 1 down vote favorite

We presently have a .co.uk domain that has been live now for around 9-10 months, recently the .com version of this domain has become available and we've purchased based on reading that suggests you should try and go for .com where possible.

My issue now is, what should I do with the .com? Should I use this in favour of the .co.uk or use both? I'm concerned that rankings might be affected if I completely replace the .co.uk with the .com.

Any suggestions?

share|improve this question

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Having the .com will only be useful if you're targeting international customer. Your your business is targeting the UK stick with your current domain name. It's perfect for your needs and there's no need to fix what isn't broken.

If you do want to switch to the .com do a 301 redirect from the .co.uk to the .com. It's simple to do and a must for SEO and usability purposes. Put this in an htaccess file in the root web directory of your .co.uk site:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]:

This will tell users and search engines your site has moved and redirect them to the same page on the new website. For SEO it will also transfer PageRank to the new URLs (with a small loss due to a dampening factor but it's minimal).

Also tell Google directly that your changing domains.

Just keep in mind during the transition you will see your rankings fluctuate and also see lots of 404 errors in your Google Webmaster Tools. This is normal.

share|improve this answer
Thanks very much for this. Just as an aside, do you feel that having the .com is better than .co.uk? – Mantorok Jul 6 '12 at 15:59
It really does depend. It usually is preferable but if you're targeting a local audience the local TLD is a better idea if you wish to maximize SEO. – John Conde♦ Jul 6 '12 at 16:06
Well, basically we are targeting everywhere except the US & Canada, so I figured .com would cover that. – Mantorok Jul 6 '12 at 16:16
It would so switching to the .com is probably a good idea. – John Conde♦ Jul 6 '12 at 16:21

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.