Should I migrate .co.uk to .com?

[JamesCrossland]

I have previously searched the forum and could not find a definitive answer on this subject so would appreciate any guidance.

I have just joined a new company, we have a .co.uk site which gets lots of traffic.

We have a .com site which is targeting USA and .com/de/ targeting Germany. 'hreflang' is configured on the .com (between the USA and German sites) but not on .co.uk. This means that in the eyes of search engines (and Moz Pro) the 2 domains are competitors (and the .co.uk has much more presence than the .com in the USA).

I know how to fix this and I am in the process of doing so. My question is whether it would make sense to migrate the .co.uk site to .com

As previously mentioned the .co.uk site already does very well both in the UK and around the world (as our product is well known in our niche). As .co.uk can only primarily be targeted to UK would our global reach increase enough to justify migrating it to .com?

We have dealers/distributors in maybe 30 countries and are continuing to expand, we will at point point add additional languages so my suggestion is that we migrate now as the authority of the .co.uk will help the emerging markets as well as increase our visibility in markets that are not currently primary targets.

We are also in the process of hiring new staff specifically to focus on Content Marketing. So again this suggests having the 1 domain will make sense in the long run (as any value gained from content marketing success will be seen by all country/language focussed sites).

I am also planning to rebuild the sites in the next few months as the current ones are not fit for purpose so the migration would coincide with this (I know this is not ideal).

Apologies for the lengthy question, I hope the additional background information will help in providing some feedback to help me make the decision.

David

[JamesCrossland]

Hi Matt.

I have one more question in regards to your initial reply.

I am on board with redirecting the .co.uk site to .com/UK/ but what would you then suggest we do with the new .com homepage?

I originally thought from your answer that you was suggesting to redirect the new .com homepage to .com/UK now I don't believe this to be the case.

Would you suggest having a location selector page on the .com homepage with ?

We currently only have 3 main locations (although we are expanding rapidly) so I am not sure this is really required.

Or would you have it set in GWT as targeting no specific location, and again set . Would this give us the best chance to try and grow in areas we do not currently have a regional website for?

Thanks again for all your assistance so far. Much appreciated!

[JamesCrossland]

Thanks again for a very comprehensive answer. As the URLs will invariable change once we rebuild it looks best to hold off the migration now and do it all in one go later in the year.

The main reason I prefer not to redirect the homepage to a sub-directory is that it looks a little messy, and if someone from USA visits our homepage I would not want them automatically directed to the /uk/ site. But it seems this may be the best of the options, thanks for the input.

[MattAntonino]

You said you don't like the idea of redirecting the root domain to a sub dir - but why? It's passing the full value of the UK site to the new location of the UK site. Makes perfect sense in my head. I would definitely do so.

I would only recommend the /US version because of the hreflangs. You can do it the other way, it's just a bit more technical to build the hreflang tags. You can use this example I've used before, though:

" hreflang="x-default" />
" hreflang="en-uk" />
" hreflang="en-de" />

This will do the trick, I believe. Then will display that in the header of every page and the request URL will grab the URL you're on so you'll end up with hreflangs for the two URL structures.

You said you could migrate .co.uk to .com/UK asap - do it as soon as you can, as long as the URL structure won't change. If you're moving from say .co.uk/about.html to .com/UK/about-us/  then you can't do it until those URLs exist. I wouldn't move the existing site over now if the URLs are going to change. This is what I was saying above - you don't want to go from .co.uk/about.html to .com/UK/about.html (and then in August) to .com/UK/about-us/

Make sense?

[JamesCrossland]

Thanks for the reply Matt.

The new site will not be ready to go live until July/August so we have plenty of time to prepare.

So you would migrate the .co.uk site to .com/uk and not directly to the .com root?

Not sure I like the idea of the root of the domain redirecting to a sub-directory (e.g. .com/UK) and it would also be difficult to migrate /co.uk to .com and .com to .com/US at the same time.

Would you then not recommend keeping the root of .com targeting en-US lang as it currently is as this would be a lot easier than moving .com to .com/us/

Or maybe we should migrate .co.uk to .com/UK asap as this then gives us 4 months or so for link equity to pass through the 301s.

Thanks.

[MattAntonino]

If it were my site, I would move the UK site to .com/UK, then have .com/DE and .com/US.

Then I would 301 redirect all the UK links back to their counterparts on the new site, keeping as much authority as possible. Point the main homepage at .com/UK and all the inner links as they currently are.

Doing this now will definitely help your expansion in the future as well.

I would do all this after you've rebuilt the site, though, because you don't want to do 301s to 301s. Figure out what the new site will be, do the 301s to that one directly. No intermediate jumps ... it's a longer time to implement but you're better off in the long run.