Advice on migrating from .com to .co.uk without dropping in rank?

[brian.james]

I have a retail business in the UK whose website has *.com address and it has taken 3 years to reach a page rank of 3.

We are building an updated site which will have a completely new url structure and optimized for SEO.

We are considering launching the new site at a *.co.uk as we understand this will have advantages in local search and ranking as we are primarily targeting UK traffic.

Does anyone have comments on **.com vs .co.uk and/or have any advice on how to handle the migration while minimizing any drop in traffic and ranking?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Beyond Daniel's suggestion, I'd support that with a press release and social campaign to promote the change.  This will provide immediate / short-term off-site signals promoting the new domain right away.

From there, long term, I'd work on link reclamation - seeing what existing inbound links you can get changed to point to the new domain - those existing links will have more value when you do that, since it's pretty much agreed that 301 redirects leak a bit of their value.

And of course, establish a long term plan for new link building to the new domain as well.

[DanDeceuster]

IT is absolutely critical to 301 redirect every one of your existing .com URL's to its new .co.uk counterpart. That's really all you can do. I would certainly be using a .co.uk domain if you are in the UK, so that's a good move.