How to consolidating my domains to the .com

[edward-may]

Hey Mozers,

Just watched Rands white board friday about consolidating domains https://moz.com/blog/rebrand-or-redirect-my-site-consolidate-multiple-sites-whiteboard-friday

I would like to consider looking at consolidating my cctld's zenory.co.nz and zenory.com.au over to zenory.com I have been told by our previous seo guy to go international eg. target USA, NZ and Australia. Consolidate into 1 website (your .com), and separate your website into different subfolders for each target country zenory.com/us/, zenory.com/au/, zenory.com/nz/. If I'm not really writing country specific content for the blog I could just keep 1 blog at zenory.com/blog/

Can anyone recommend a guide around the technical side of how to apply these changes without causing issues?  Our website is custom built with wordpress being the blog.

Any advice will be much appreciated

Cheers

[Highland]

That's actually bad advice. Go back and look at the Whiteboard link you posted again. In Rand's case, he's talking about multiple disparate domains. In that case, rebranding to one domain makes a lot of sense, especially if you can get a better TLD to rebrand under.

In your case, you already have a brand and you have multiple ccTLDs. That is a good thing, not a bad one. ccTLDs send a localization signal and Google is more likely to rank you well in a localized search with one. Additionally, it sends a signal to your local customers that you have a local site. Finally, you can copy as much content as you want between domains (provided you properly localize it, inasmuch as you can localize English sites).

If you are still bent on moving, a 301 redirect is the way to go.

[edward-may]

Hi Highland,

Thank you so much for your input here.  I actually wondered if it applied if it applied to me because I had one brand across all 3 domains.  The reason why we established it this way was because it does send better signal to our local customers and in that case we are ranking quiet well for competitive keywords in Australia and New Zealand.  The USA domain is quiet slow at the moment, but I'm sure that is because it is a lot steeper.

One thing that stood out in Rands video was the content and the audience overlap.  Content is the same for all three and our audience is the same for all 3.