Has anyone relocated a website from one country to another?

[GardenBeet]

Has anyone relocated a website from one country to another?

I want to replace all reference from one country (UK) to another (Australia)

Phone number change, currency change, address will change

Meta/products/content/urls will remain the same

The .com URL will be associated to Australia

Will the website keep its ranking or will it be damaged to the point where another website should be built from scratch?

[wearehappymedia]

Hi,

Will the URL change?

[wearehappymedia]

Re-reading your question it sounds like the URL will change.

So lets say you have funstuff.co.uk and your new site is funstuff.com.au the best stepn is to 301 re-direct the .co.uk to the new geo-targeted site and it will transfer 90% of the existing link juice.

We've done this many times and it works just fine.

[GardenBeet]

thanks for quick response - the URL will NOT change

the existing site is a .com

Currently I redirect the .co.uk and the .com.au to the .com

The website is targetted to UK via Google's Country Targeting setting

Am rather surprised to hear you have seen no changes! How old were these sites? Did they have much page rank?

[RobertJakobson]

Hi,

I highly advise you to acquire a Google Webmaster Tools and a connect that with your Analytics account to facilitate and monitor the change in your target audience. After you have set both up, here are the 2 main features that help to solve your problem:

1. Hreflang attributes. Google states at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Many websites serve users from around the world with content translated or targeted to users in a certain region. Google uses the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in Search results.

Hreflang offers website or subpage targeting per language (English not French), country (so Australia not the UK). But note that it requires manually changing your site's mark-up.

2. Also of use is Country Targeting https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, and targets users in a particular geographic location, you can provide us with information to help us determine how your site appears in our search results. This improves Google Search results for geographic queries, and it won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country. See a full list of domains Google treats as generic.

[GardenBeet]

Thanks Robert. Yep all those accounts are in place. I understand that I can monitor the impacts of the change. But I would like to get an understanding of whether its worth making the change in the first place.

Anyone else redirected an established website (5 years plus with PR 3 +) to another country.

[MoosaHemani]

Never shift a website from one country to another country by myself but let me tell you what theory tells us.

-          Map Changing

If you website was associated to any business registered in Google Maps and other yellow pages than you carefully need to remove all listings and re-register it on another country. These will defiantly going to hurt your rankings on specific country where you were ranking before.

The problem is results for every country are different from others so if the rankings didn’t really changed (most probably it will fluctuate for local keywords) the rankings that you had in US will not be the same in AU.

What you should be doing.

1. Change your NAP and Re-register your maps in Google and other Yellow pages.
2. Update content accordingly
3. Get new links from .AU domains
4. Change your targeted country in Google Webmaster Tool
5. Get links from local keywords

And you will see your rankings will start appearing in google.com.au

Hope this helps!