Technical 301 question

[TVFurniture]

Howdy all, this has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to know the communities ideas on this.

We have a .com website which has a little domain authority and is growing steadily. We are a UK business (but have a US office which we will be adapting too soon)

We are ranking better within google.com than we do on google.co.uk probably down to our TLD.

Is it a wise idea to 301 our .com to .co.uk for en-gb enquiries only? Is there any evidence that this will help improve our position? will all the link juice passed from 301s go to our .co.uk only if we are still applying the use of .com in the US?

Many thanks and hope this isn't too complicated!

Best wishes,
Chris

[seomozinator]

Howdy, my friend.

This does sound a little complicated.

We have a .com website which has a little domain authority and is growing steadily. We are a UK business (but have a US office which we will be adapting too soon)

We are ranking better within google.com than we do on google.co.uk probably down to our TLD.

From first line it sounds like you have one domain (.com), second line tells me that you got two domains (.co.uk and .com). So, which is it? well, it wouldn't affect my answer, I guess, I'll cover both.

So, let's go step-by-step:

1. Is it a wise idea to 301 our .com to .co.uk for en-gb enquiries only? - No!Because i can be in any part of the world and i can set my browser locale header to whatever i want. Or it can happen automatically due to whatever circumstances. So, let's say I'm travelling from UK to US. My browser is set to en-gb locale, I do my search for your company in US, I get redirected to UK website, even though I want to fing US one - no good. Bad UX

2. Is there any evidence that this will help improve our position? will all the link juice passed from 301s go to our .co.uk only if we are still applying the use of .com in the US? - I combine these two into one answer. Link juice can be passed if crawlers can differentiate locale on a given URL. Here is how they can do it:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en

So, let's say there is a website with link to yours. It's one link. You can't set two "hreflang"s, or "rel"s, or write it in two languages at the same time on the same URL. So, basically you can tell bots to consider that link as a "juice-passer" to only one domain.

Now, is there a good reason for you guys to have two different domains? If it has similar information, style etc., you can combine them into one (use subdomains or subfolders - Matt Cutts video) and pretty much cut efforts in half with double the return

If there is a good reason for you guys to have completely different domains, I would concentrate for building/working/structuring .uk website for UK and .com website for US. It means that you'll have to do two backlink profiles building, two different technical and "another one" (forgot the word ) SEOs and so on.

Hope this helps.

[TVFurniture]

Hi Charles, we want to ideally have one domain - the .com. To simplify My question is about using 301 to pass link juice to both the .co.uk and the .com, with google.co.uk ranking the .co.uk website and google.com ranking the .com website using 301 rewrite rules. I am not too interested in looking at the UX side for now, this is just purely based on search engine urls and how they get structured, and the reason we want to do this, is because I feel the .com is not ranking as well on google.co.uk because google favours .co.uk offer .com.

it will still be ONE website.

hope that is a little clearer.

[katemorris]

First, please don't ignore UX. That is a big part of how the search engines operate today.

As Charles said, an IP based 301 redirect is a very bad idea. Please, please don't do it. It will only hurt you. Google only crawls from the US, so they will never see the redirect. And as Charles said, US people traveling in the UK would not be able to get to the US site.

Also, like Charles, I am confused. You have 2 domains, but want one. I think that is what you mean. You have .co.uk and .com, but would prefer to have everything on .com. That's possible, in my testings, having a .co.uk is not a guarantee for ranking. It can help search engines understand your target market, but regional TLDs (ccTOLDs) are meant for businesses that only operate in that country, or have content/products/information that is specific to that region.

.com on the other hand is a generic TLD, it is not focused to one country.

If you want the .com to rank better in the UK, there are a few questions I need you to answer. In fact, go here: http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/ and let me know what result you get from those questions. Then I can help you with the technical setup.

[seomozinator]

- I am not too interested in looking at the UX side for now

Bad-bad-bad-bad idea

- I feel the .com is not ranking as well on google.co.uk because google favours .co.uk offer .com.it will still be ONE website.

Ok, .com is not gonna be favourable to local google domains, because it's "international" as Kate said. And still, the juice is not gonna be redirected from a link, just if you 301 it for en-gb locale. As I was saying before, link is "tied" to whatever domain it's linking, unless it has hreflang.

So, my suggestion is still the same: either combine two domains in one, or use two and do double work on SEO and backlinks.

[TVFurniture]

thanks for your input both - so what would be your two cents into how to do this? - we have a .com and want to keep .com as the central point, UK is our prime business so far.

[seomozinator]

My suggestion stays the same - "either combine two domains in one, or use two and do double work on SEO and backlinks"

If you do decide to combine them, i'd use .com

[TVFurniture]

Hi Charles so keep .com and then leverage hreflang and rewrite rules to - /en-gb and /en-us maybe?

Chris

[katemorris]

Have you checked out that tool yet and answered the questions? I can help you with the technical implementation, but need to know what's best for your business first.

[seomozinator]

I'm confused a little

If you are going to be using only one domain, you don't have to use hreflang whatsoever.

If you do decide to kepp both, then you don't have to use hreflag or rewrite rules either, just do backlinks to whatever domains you need and that's it.