Risks of Migrating tld's to sub folders

[ConradC]

Hi Guys,

I am thinking of migrating our .co.nz and our .co.uk websites into sub folders on our .com website (eg: .com/uk and .com/nz). Do you think this is a risky strategy in regards to our performance in the localised search engines or should the centralisation of all these websites and their link authority into the .com help us move up the rankings? We are thinking of doing this in the next week, we have some really good rankings for the local googles, however we also have plenty of phrases sitting just on page 2 and I was hoping this might help boost them onto page 1?

Has anyone else had experience migrating tld sites to sub folders on a .com and if so what was your experience of the impact on search rankings in the local googles and the timeframe that these changes took to have an effect? Did you have any negative results?

[ConradC]

Thanks Jane - much appreciated. I think we will bring our .co.nz into the .com under a new sub folder, wait  and see what the results are and then base a decision off that for our .co.uk - have a great holidays and thanks once again.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Conrad,

Sorry for the late reply on this. I hope it is still helpful.

In general, this is always what we recommend, unless the ccTLDs (or whatever is being redirected) has a substantial history that makes it so strong that it can survive well on its own. If you're languishing in the SERPs or need a boost, this can certainly provide it. Keep in mind that you don't take 100% of the link equity from one site to another during a 301, but you take a large portion, and the added strength from the domain should more than make up for this.

There is absolutely no guarantee that you will get positive results, or won't get negative results - the most likely scenario is that you'll see a dip in rankings and traffic as Google acknowledges the redirects, but that original rankings will return within a matter or days or weeks. After that, your ascent through the SERPs should be faster than when the content was on a ccTLD as opposed to a subfolder.

Where I would not do this, again, is where substantial effort has been put into the ccTLDs and they are climbing steadily on their own. This, to my mind, is always a move to be made when other options do not appear to be making a lot of difference.