Redirect ot new domain

[Uniline]

Hello,

Can someone give me advice on this specific situation:

For now we have a website www.website.com/

Because of some specific business situation we want to move to .ca version but also we want to keep website.com - for U.S customers.

Here's how I imagined to do this:

301 Redirect from www.website.com to website.ca.

Because at this time website.com redirects to www.website.com I would remove the redirect and just keep it like website.com (so this will be new domain).

Is this is the right solution?

Regards,

Nenad

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Nenad

Without the background on this, this may be a little difficult to answer.

To make sure I am understanding your question, you are essentially saying...

Currently:

• website.com 301 redirects to www.website.com
• No website.ca

Future:

• Remove website.com 301 redirect to www.website.com
• www.website.com 301 redirect to www.website.ca

Is this correct? Without telling you what to do, my issue here is that you are creating a very confusing user experience - for one, you have a website.com showing one website, and a www.website.com redirecting to another website. If I somehow, as a user, end up typing in "www.website.com" (and yes, users still type in www., myself included) I get to a website that isn't meant for me. I am also not entirely sure it's possible from a technical standpoint (I will leave that to another user to answer).

If it were my site, I would leave the website.com redirect to www.website.com (as I am assuming you have built equity in that URL), I would then go to my Webmaster Tools, target that site for the United States and whoever else that site is meant for.

Then, I would build the www.website.ca and also go into Webmaster Tools and geotarget that for Canada and whoever else is supposed to see that site.

I would also consider using a prompt asking users if they want the United States site or the Canada site depending on their location, and also (depending on French-Canadian language users and if you were using the same content) look into hreflang - just something to think about.

My fear is you creating a bad experience for your users by way of unintended confusion. Think about your users first. It's just not a best practice at all what you're describing - from both a UX and technical perspective.

Hopefully this helps, let me know if there is something I am missing here as well.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I agree with Patrick we need more info

there's no way to run them side-by-side efficiently without using Hreflang
you will have to pick a www.or non-www.
domain
using a tool like https://www.deepcrawl.com/ is going to make this easy to check. You can do this many ways including via site map

http://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php
http://www.internationalseomap.com/hreflang-tags-generator/
http://www.internationalseomap.com/
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/getting-a-better-understanding-of-hreflang/60468/

Let's assume you were to pick website.com as your default

http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

By Geo targeting your subfolder e.g. /ca/ in Google Webmaster tools you can accomplish your goal that would look something like this.

If you end up choosing to 301 redirect your existing site to a new site make sure it is page to page not just redirecting the entire domain.
http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

I hope this helps and please inform me more about what you are actually planning on doing because it is kind of tough to guess.

All the best, Tom

[BlueprintMarketing]

Nenad

by dropping the www. & trying to have each domain indexed but tied together in the fashion you suggested will not work.  Every domain must have a page 2 page 301 redirect ideally  you should be using Hreflang  too do what you're describing

http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/301-redirects/

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633

Redirect to another page

To redirect one page to another page:

Redirect /old-index.html http://www.mynewwebsite.com/foldername/new-index.html

E.G. https://css-tricks.com/snippets/htaccess/301-redirects/

check with

TOOLS

http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/

http://www.htaccessredirect.net/

https://websiteadvantage.com.au/HtAccess-301-Redirect-Generator

[Uniline]

Patrick thank you very much for your answer and time!

You are right that this can create bad user experience. The reason we want to do this is: we have strong www.website.com site that are ranking good in Canada (this is our main target).

Since we'll splitting our website into .com and .ca domain I was thinking that redirecting www.website.com to website.ca would be the best option (since the Canada is our primary target).

My only concern is what to do with .com domain. I know that subfolders with hreflang will be the best solution but we would like to have .com.and .ca as separate  (we will use hreflang)

[Uniline]

Hi Tom, thank you very much for your answer and time! I explained to Patrick above which are the reasons for doing in this way.

I will have to find another way because this will obviously not work.