Moving .com to .co.uk without compromising .com

[dipunm]

Hey guys,

I have spent a little time searching for a suitable solution, but I feel like maybe directly asking my specific question is the best way to go about this:

We have a site www.mywebsite.com and it serves all UK customers (right now, the site is useless for US customers). We would like to move those customers to www.mywebsite.co.uk and carry all the google points we have accrued with it but unfortunately, I feel like a 301 redirect would cause a big issue because in January, we want to launch a new site which will have very similar if not the same urls but the content will target our new US customers. I don't want to end up in a position where our customers end up with redirect loops or where we end up confusing customers.

For now, our solution is this:

• make our site available on both .com and .co.uk
• canonical tags on both sites will be set to the UK version of the site.
• if the user enters the homepage on .com, we show a page saying: "hey, we are launching a US site soon, click here to read more and sign up, or click here to go to the UK site." - this page will not have a UK canonical tag because it has no equivalent on the UK site.
• If the user clicks on the "goto uk site" button, they have acknowledged that we have 2 sites now and we can 302 redirect them to the equivalent .co.uk page every time they go to .com until we get .com live (powered by a cookie). -- we hope that bots won't be affected by this. It would be good to know if it will affect bots or have any negative SEO side effects.
• at this point, we have 2 types of users, informed and uninformed users. Informed if they clicked the button described above.
• if the user enters any other page on .com, we don't redirect uninformed users, we just let them use the site as normal because we don't know if 302 redirects will cause issues for our ranking.
• if the user enters any other page on .com, we redirect informed users to the .co.uk site... this includes the .com homepage
• If the user goes to .co.uk, the site is normal. No special landing pages, no redirects, no extra cookies.
• We want to start changing external .com links to .co.uk and new content we write about our site will start going to .co.uk
• When .com goes live, we will remove the redirects and people using .com will start seeing US content instead of UK content. People using co.uk will be unaffected. Hopefully, google is directing most of our customers to .co.uk by now.

Ideally, we want to transfer our google ranking from .com to .co.uk since it is technically a move, but I need to be sure there will be no side effects from using 301 redirects when we put the US site live... Both SEO wise and UX wise.

Anyways, does anyone see any potential problems with our current plan? are 302's problematic for our SEO goals (moving .com points to .co.uk)? will changing canonical from .com to .co.uk have positive or negative effects? Can we safely apply 301's and is it necessary... esp. considering the short timeline (releasing US in Janurary). Are there any extra steps we can take to maximise our efforts and/or speed up the site transfer. Is it a bad idea to allow .com to serve the same content as .co.uk except the homepage? Any gotchas you can think of?

Thanks in advance,

Dipun

[dipunm]

Hey Gianluca,

Thanks for that very detailed response, I have a few extra questions:

1. You say using the canonical tag vs 301 redirects is risky: Is that to say, having this solution in place even for a few weeks whilst we plan and implement a better solution could have negative effects for us? If so, what sort of negative effects could we incur?

Before the next question, I'd like to give you a little more background; our site is like an online shop, but refers you to other retailers to complete your purchase. We have department pages, a few content pages like "contact" and "terms", a search listing page, a homepage, and a brands page.

• Our department pages have links to related articles, brands and products and I expect these will be very different between the two sites.
• We have a search page, but the data changes daily and the data will be drastically different between the two sites at any one time since the products will be from retailers local to the US/UK
• Our brands page is mostly generated and so can change slightly per day but is likely to be very similar accross the two sites.
• Our static pages will likely start of identical and start to evolve independently (if at all) over a very long period.

2. Keeping all of this in mind, I am not sure if hreflang is still appropriate because it is not going to be the same content translated, but instead similar pages with uniquely tailored content based on its location. What are your thoughts on this? Am I misinterpreting or being to strict in my understanding of what hreflang should be used for?

3. in the above response, you wrote: "you should preview a dilution of PageRank because of the internal linking toward the new USA version" - Is this to say we will start to lose page rank on the UK site as people start to visit the USA site? I just wanted to be clear about what this means, because I am seeing words such as "preview", "dilution" and "internal-linking" which sound like they may or may not be SEO related terms.

4. Finally, I have read conflicting articles about the effectiveness of adding a cache expiry to 301 redirects. Could this be effective for our scenario? Will Google interpret it as a temporary redirect? Will user browsers really expire the 301 when we specify?

Thanks for your advice,

Dipun

[gfiorelli1]

Doing a domain migration without doing a 301 is totally useless.

The rel="canonical" solution is too risky IMHO, because - albeit effective in most of the cases - the rel="canonical" still is only a strong suggestion we give to Google and not a directive. So, personally I consider your idea quite risky.

I don't know the specifications of your site (how big is it? what kind of site is it?...), so do not take my answer for granted.

Personally, I would consider the idea of creating the USA site in a subfolder /en-us/, which you can easily geo-target to USA.

This way you would not have to fear any possible risk related to a migration, even though you should preview a dilution of PageRank because of the internal linking toward the new USA version.

Then, using the hreflang (that you should have to use anyway also if you choose to go forward with your plan), you will avoid the "duplicate content" issue.

On the other hand, what you're describing is a migration, so (honestly) you should work it as a normal domain to domain migration and schedule it so to have concluded before the first half of December.

I understand that all the complicated solution you presented to us is due to the fact that the soon to come USA site will be substantially a duplicate of the UK one, so the problem is:

I've the 301 set -up and running, but I've to quit the 301 if I want the USA site to be visible.

The simplest solution is to create the USA site in a subfolder www.domain.com/us/ and use the homepage www.domain.com as country selector, which can useful in the beginning also to comply all the things you are telling about informing the UK users of the new .co.uk domain.

Just adding the /us/ subfolders all the URL of the new site will be different, hence you can maintain the 301 on place.