Comments on: Moving from country code domain to .com

By: divemaster

divemaster — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 05:01:18 +0000

I am not an expert of this but for some who have that kind of site they usually consider the strategy of buying a .com that will redirect to the their original site. This can help in getting visitors from other places. Not really sure about the impact of this strategy.

By: skolkovo

skolkovo — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:14:17 +0000

Hi Scott,

Is your current site hosted in the UK?
Are your registration details in the UK?
Currently from where does most of your traffic come?

My instinct would be that if you’re hosted in the UK and if your registration details are open and you 301 it, that it probably stands a fair chance of retaining good rankings however, as you probably know, .co.uk sites tend to dominate many UK SERPs and especially so with Google.

The one good thing is that if it fails miserably that reverting to the .co.uk should not be an issue and should regain rankings rapidly.

An interesting experiment, let us know how it goes.

By: Harvey@PS3

Harvey@PS3 — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:07:17 +0000

I really like the way you can set a .com to geotarget the UK.

If you hosted the domain in the US would that not help for .com?

By: Jason Jumat

Jason Jumat — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:39:25 +0000

Didn’t realize one can switch from a localized site like .co.uk to .com Have read somewhere that one can also completely change a site’s url. That’s wicked!
Scott, I think obviously because you localized your site to .co.uk tells (told) Google in the first place that it’s probably more important in that region than worldwide. This is exactly why your results would trigger on the first pages within the UK but not worldwide.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:55:40 +0000

I have noticed for one of my sites that I rank a lot better on Google.ca than on Google.com and as I’m from Finland and my server is in Texas on a dot com domain I can only believe it’s the inbound links that skews the geo targeting.

I have some prominent links from sites that seem to be used by a lot of Canadians even if I don’t know if the site itself is in Canada (not on a dot ca at least)

So watch out where you get your link if you want specific geo targeting.

Simon

By: PPC Icon

PPC Icon — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:36:19 +0000

Looks like a sound move, a little bit of short term pain for some long term gain:)

By: Dale

Dale — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:54:30 +0000

Stick a Translator on it!

Also where the domain is hosted is a factor effecting “world results.” Domains I have simply moved to the USA to host have done far beter than the same domain on a UK Server.. go figure!

By: Stephen

Stephen — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:30:28 +0000

10,000 visitors a day is fantastic, 30,000 is just boombastic. The best I can do on any of my sites is 2.5k/day (and that was around Christmas), so I’m not in a position to offer advice but will certainly like to see if you do start to get ranked in google.com.

By: Roland Head

Roland Head — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:40:02 +0000

I haven’t moved from a .co.uk to a .com but have moved a site from one .co.uk to a different .co.uk domain. It went without a hitch – exactly as you describe and traffic is now better than ever.

I think there’s a lot of fear about changing domains but done correctly (with 301s) it is a fairly safe process now.

Roland

By: Chris Guthrie

Chris Guthrie — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:09:47 +0000

Hey Scott,

I moved my blog and posted some results feel free to look:

http://www.makemoneyontheinternet.com/moving-my-blog/

I didn’t include traffic figures and instead referred to rankings in Google as an indicator of success.

Chris