.co.uk to .com - Transfer of domain

[qtasad]

After having our site up for over a year and gaining PR 3 and more than a dozen page 1 rankings on Google for most of our competitive terms, we have realised we have to transfer to .com from our current .co.uk URL for legal reasons.

What would the best way be to carry out such a move in an SEO perspective?

[gfiorelli1]

Read this Google webmaster help: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en

That page explains very easily what to do, but you can sum it with

• 301 old urls to new site urls;
• control the inbound links and eventually ask to change the URL in the link to the new page. If not possible, the 301 will redirect the visits from that link to the new page, but will loose a little bit of PR;
• use the Webmaster Tools > Change of address function to alert Google of the change of address;
• Add the new site in Google Webmaster Tool
• Notify Google with a sitemap of the new site

There will be a period where Google will crawl both the old and the new site... but I believe that you will have to block Google from indexing the old one due to the legal issue you told. That can be done via robots.txt and noindex, nofollow in the meta robots

[seoug_2005]

How can we 301 the inbound links to our site, if the links are from other sites ? Supposing, the webmaster has placed our link oh his site.  Should we ask the webmaster of the site to do this as he has the ftp details only.

[gfiorelli1]

Mmm... it is not the webmaster that does the 301... it is your server that does it.

I mean:

1. the inbound link send to your old url page
2. search engines bot (and users) follow that link and arrive to your site
3. your server sees that a visit is directed to the old url
4. the server then apply the rule you gave him via .htaccess (for instance) and redirect the visit to the new url of the page

In this "transfer" a little bit of pagerank seems getting lost, that is why is alway better to ask to the owner of the site where the backlink is to update the link itself, if possible.