.com ranking over other ccTLD's that were created

[DRSearchEngOpt]

We had a ecommerce website that used to function as the website for every other locale we had around the world.  For example the French version was Domain.com/fr_FR/ or a German version in English would be Domain.com/en_DE/.  Recently we moved all of our larger international locales to their corresponding ccTLD so no we have Domain.fr and Domain.de.(This happened about two months ago)  The problem with this is that we are getting hardly any organic traffic and sales on these new TLD's.  I am thinking this is because they are new but I am not positive.  If you compare the traffic we used to see on the old domain versus the traffic we see on the new domain it is a lot less.

I am currently going through to make sure that all of the old pages are not up and the next thing I want to know is for the old pages would it be better to use a 301 re-direct or a rel=canonical to the new ccTLD to avoid duplicate content and those old pages from out ranking our new pages?

Also what are some other causes for our traffic being down so much?  It just seems that there is a much bigger problem but I don't know what it could be.

[RobertFisher]

TANKS!

[RobMay]

Nice additions Robert! Cheers.

[RobMay]

Great response. I would have given you exactly the same steps. You should follow John's advise:)

Link building to these individual ccTLD's will be the biggest obstacle to overcome, especially in short amounts of time (if that matters), but, if you have time and resources, this will help the geographic level of your brand on a global level. It's just too bad when you have to break up one master domain (pooled together), and go with individual domains for each country you are targeting.

Cheers, Rob

[RobertFisher]

You want to use a 301 for the redirect to insure you get the juice from previous links. Here are two good articles from moz: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection and since you moved domains: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains

By using the 301 you are telling the engines that not only the location changed, but that any updated content, etc. will be found there.

When you do this, you can take a snapshot of the values (DA, PA, MozTrust, etc.) of both pages and follow along. We are starting to do that with any site changes and 301's to develop a timeline until Site A acquires what it will from Site B and will eventually do a paper on same.

Best.

[john4math]

The new domains have no domain authority yet, as they are new and likely have few backlinks, so it makes sense they'd rank poorly to start.  Now you'll have to build links to these new domains individually.  The nice thing about your set up before is that all of your domains pooled all of their domain authority within one domain.  Hopefully having the different ccTLDs will pay off for you down the line.

This is a good time to 301 redirect your old pages to their new counterparts.  That should help your new domains because the link juice from those pages will flow to your new domain.  If you weren't redirecting those pages to begin with, that could be the cause of your rankings being so poor.  In that case though, I would imagine the old site would be outranking the new ones?