How to safely move from .com to .co.uk and minimise SEO work lost

[Marvellous]

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[eyepaq]

Hello,

I can see the thought process there but correlation doesn't mean causation. A dot com targeted (WMT) on UK will have the same benefits as a co.uk domain.

However a co.uk might have a higher CTR - and that could be reason enough to switch.

Take into account that if you do move / migrate and if you do everything by the book you will still "lose" something with the 301 redirects. (using 301 redirects is the main option for a migration). Also with any migration there are a lot of "possible points of failure" so you should take that into account.

Hope it helps.

[Marvellous]

HI,

Thanks for the response. However, how would you explain the fact that other local bournemouth web design companies with a much higher PA/DA are ranking lower than their competitors with a much lower PA/DA simply because they have a .com?

I would assume these agencies would have already set their WMT to target UK, given that the site title for one of the is Born Digital | Web Design Bournemouth so they are clearly targeting a specific town in UK.

They get on local map list but not on top 10 serp list and even if they do, they are beat by weaker site with a .co.uk domain. Can only lead me to believe very strong favouritsm towards .co.uk domains for localised searches?

And I understand the risk, however I've weighed it out. Redweb or borndigital are top web design agencies who are struggling to break top 10 serp for web design bournemouth because of their .com TLD. I don't want to wait another year and find that I do need to switch to .co.uk because of the strong favoritism? And even if I did make the top 10 SERP, perhaps instead of being 9th I would have been 1st had it been a .co.uk...certainly I would have though redweb and born4digital would make top 5 had it not been for their .com tld.

Thanks

[Hannah_Smith]

Hello there,

I can understand your thought process, but I'm not convinced that the reason for the differences in rankings are related to the TLD. Whilst it's tempting to draw that conclusion, ranking algorithms are incredibly complex and I'd be very surprised if making the switch would result in better rankings for you.

That said, if you are convinced that switching to the .co.uk is the way to go check out this post, it provides an exhaustive list of everything you'll need to do: https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[Marvellous]

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[Hannah_Smith]

Hey,

So the US v UK example you've cited isn't the same thing. A .com is a generic TLD, not a country-specific TLD - by this I mean '.com' doesn't automatically indicate a US site. Getting a .co.uk site to rank well in the US will be a challenge as Google will automatically consider the site to be UK targeted.

Take a look at this SERP: https://www.google.fr/#q=acheter+dvd

That's a search on google.fr for 'acheter dvd' (buy dvd). You'll notice the top 3 results are French sites, but they're hosted on .com domains. You'll see that there are a bunch of sites hosted on .fr domains ranking on the first page too.

NB I'm not saying that those sites on the .com are ranking better because of the generic TLD - I'm merely highlighting it because I think it shows that it's perfectly possible to rank well with a generic rather than country-targeted TLD

[Marvellous]

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