Impact issues when switching from .com to uk

[Nightwing]

Buon Giorno from wetherby UK 5 degrees C and rivers bursting their banks everywhere

This site http://www.sandtoft.com/ has requested a switch in url forwardfing in that they want the following to happen:

When u enter the .com url it forwards to the .co.uk domain (the opposite from what it is today ie when you eneter .co.uk it switches to the .com url)

So my question is please...

"Will changing the .com url to .co.uk via forwarding affect SERPS in any significant manner" My view is the impact will be a minor dip in the serps followed by a recovery.

Any insights welcome

[MattJanaway]

I did a similar thing not too long ago (maybe 9 months ago) for a friend. To cut a long story short he only usually averaged 50 visitors a day coming on to his website from Google and about 400 visitors as direct traffic. He ran a large scale offline marketing campaign and the printers managed to screw up his domain name so he wanted to do the same thing as your client.

I anticipated a similar effect to what you expect in that SERPS might drop slightly but then recover. However, his 50 visitors a day dropped to around 25 a day for 3 months and all his rankings (not that there were many terms he ranked for anyway!) dropped off quite badly. After 3 months, they recovered quite well apart from one search term.

I think on a larger scale operation such as yours, the data and figures might represent a real life answer a little more than my data set on such a small scale website... Due to this its hard to say whether you will see a similar effect on your clients website.

[irvingw]

They already have Google confused and they are serving up .co.uk pages in the index

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sandtoft.co.uk&oq=site:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sandtoft.co.uk&gs_l=hp.3...7614.8078.1.8242.3.3.0.0.0.0.346.346.3-1.1.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.7Aw11D7yXBY&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=aa7a9b1de1b17414&bpcl=38897761&biw=1920&bih=909

I agree with the move for a UK site to have a co.uk domain just make sure you are doing it accress the board, properly forwarding the .com and updating all sitemap.xml files and internal navigation

P.S.

• block your plugins folder in robots.txt

• check webmaster tools for duplicate title tags and make them all unique

• Optimize your title tag you have <title><a class="l" href="http://www.sandtoft.co.uk/resource-centre/photo-gallery/photo-gallery-images/?photoID=634&DSID=12">Sandtoft Roof Tiles - Photo Gallery Images</title>

should be something more like <title><strong>Grey Slate Roof Tiles</strong> | Sandtroft Tile Store</title>

with the description of the tile at the beginning of the tag, not the name of the company, that's your domain name you'll already rank for that.