International SEO Question

[awestwood]

_The company I work for has a website www.example.com that ranks very well in English speaking countries - US, UK, CA. For legal reasons, we now need to create www.example.co.uk to be accessible and rank in google.co.uk. Obviously we want this change to be as smooth as possible with little effect on rankings in the UK. We have two options that we're talking through at the moment -

1. Use the hreflang tag on both the .com and the .co.uk to tell Google which site to rank in each country. My worry with this is that we might lose our rankings in the UK as it will be a brand new site with little to no links pointing to it.

2. 301 redirect to the .co.uk based on UK IP addresses. I'm skeptical about this. As a 301 passes most of the link juice, I'm not sure how Google would treat this type of thing - would the .com lose ranking?

So my questions are - would we lose ranking in the UK if we use option 1? Would option 2 work? What would you do?

Any help is appreciated._

[KristinaKledzik]

First of all, I'd like a little more information about the "legal reasons" that are forcing to you create ccTLDs for Canada and the UK. What you're doing now is actually ideal for international SEO when it comes to the same language, so I wouldn't want to change things unless it's really necessary.

• Is it because the EU has stricter laws regarding privacy? In that case, I'd recommend following the strictest laws for the entire .com site and leaving it at that.
• Is it because your company has to offer different legal information from country to country? If that's true, I'd post all legal information on my site, for all countries, and let visitors look at the pieces that are most relevant.
• Is it because you're starting to sell different products? In that case, yes, you probably need a new ccTLD since you technically have different sites, but that means that you can't really use hreflang, since your product pages will be different.

If it's something I didn't list, and you absolutely have to create new ccTLDs, the best recommendation is to use hreflang. You can either use it in the of your page, like you said, or in the XML sitemap so the extra code doesn't have to be loaded with each page.

Hreflangs work a little like canonicals, so Google can choose to pay attention to the international versions of the site or ignore them, but eventually yes, your UK and Canadian sites should rank as well as your .com site. There will definitely be a dip in traffic as Google figures things out, though.

Hope this helps, and good luck!