Redirection based on country and impact on rankings

[thefresh]

I have a website that ranks number 1 in google.co.uk for its main key term and ranks number 4 in google.com.au.

However i would rather that visitors in australia see domain.com.au rather than domain.co.uk.

Is there a way to achieve this using some clever 301s without impacting the rankings in australia and so that the .com.au starts to rank in place of the .co.uk

OR

Would you advise launching a .com.au version of the site hosted separately with unique / re-written content on it.?

[thefresh]

Hi Hannah,

Thanks for this this was what i was looking for in terms of advice. I was only a bit skeptical about having an australian site that ranks as well as a uk site on page one. and if they are both giving out the same info how useful would this be.

The linkbuilding shouldnt be too difficult.

Thanks for your help!

Prav

[Hannah_Smith]

Sorry! Misunderstood you

Yes, you could launch a .com.au but even if you have created Australian content I'd probably still be inclined to implement rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in your sitemaps; as the content will still likely be very similar.

The only issue with this is that your new domain won't have much in the way of link equity so it still might not rank without some link building effort on your part.

A further alternative would be to get yourself a generic domain like a .com and split into subfolders - /uk and /au. You'd then only have one site to build links to rather than two...

However the process of migrating from your .co.uk to your .com (and the potential to lose rankings whilst the search engines figure out what you're doing) might make this option unattractive.

I guess I'm saying launching the .com.au is probably quicker, cleaner and less risky but be aware you'll probably need to do some link building too.

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[thefresh]

Thanks for this hanna, its the homepage ranking for the same term in both UK and Oz.

i have been told that when the Ozzzies see a .co.uk they are less likely to click on the result.

if i launched a .com.au version of the site with unique content but deliveroing the same info do you think this would be an issue?

[Hannah_Smith]

Hello there,

I'd suggest that employing redirects is unlikely to result in the .com.au site ranking instead of the .co.uk version - essentially all you're doing is pushing any Australian visitors who come to you over to the Australian version of the site.

In order to try get the appropriate versions of the site ranking you might try implementing rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in your sitemaps - see http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865

I'd also recommend including things like local bricks and mortar addresses, local telephone numbers, displaying local currency etc to help the search engines understand which locations you're trying to target.

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[MalcolmGibb]

You could use IP re-directs, but they are notoriously innacurate especially if people are using proxies.

Obviously showing a .co.uk in Australia is not the best, but it is ranking high. One idea if the domains are the same and have the same content is to only target UK in webmaster tools with the uk domain and .com.au for Australia. This may not solve it though and may impact rankings.

Your best bet would be to do the Geo redirects. I wouldn't think there would be that many issues as you don't have hundreds of different countries.