Switch from CCTLD to .com - Am I missing anything?
-
We currently have 14 international sites. (.co.uk, .fr, .es, .com.au, etc) and (language differences aside) the content is the same on all.
I want to move this content from example.co.uk to example.com/uk/ (and from example.com.sg to example.com/sg/) to consolidate our domain authority, for brand consistency, and to reduce the overhead of maintaining 14 different domains. Our .com has by far the most domain authority (90) and often outcompetes newer smaller sites like .com.sg in local search) Other sites, however, (like .co.uk DA74) do quite well locally.
My goal is to improve the performance of those sites with a low DA, without hurting the larger sites, and also to avoid the disappearance of local content in local search. e.g. currently when a user searches for "widgets" they find example.co.uk/widgets/ but in future I want them to find example.com/uk/widgets
My plan is to redirect pages with 301 redirects, and use rel-alternate and hreflang metadata to manage indexing. So in the example above, I'd 301 example.co.uk/widgets to example.com/uk/widgets, then use the following metatag on that new page to suggest that it is the UK english version (for users in the UK) of a canonical page in the .com:
(this is in accordance with the suggestion on this page http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077)
My question is: Am I going to severely damage the ranking of, e.g., UK pages in UK search engines by doing this? Is there a better way to do this?
Any input greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Dennis
-
Actually the methodology you have described is correct.
Just two tips/reminders:
- the correct use of the rel="alternate" previews that in the .com pages (for instance) you indicate the other 13 country targeting URLs of your site. That is needed to not seeing, for instance, your .com pages outranking your Spanish ones in Google.es because of a better link profile (or Page Authority);
- for that reason I do really suggest you to implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" in your sitemaps.xml more than into the code of every single page of your site (you don't want to slow your page speed, don't you?).
About what bnspak write, the correct tip is this:
- create the new site, with the new country level subcarpet arquitecture;
- implement cross domain canonical tags in your old ccTld domains
- cancel your ccTlds sitemaps.xml files in GWT and resubmit them... doing so you are explicitly asking Google to recrawl them asap
- Googlebot crawls the ccTlds and discover the rel="canonical"
- Do the 301 page by page
Finally, ccTld or Subcarpet. The decision should be just based on SEO, but on business. Yes, you're going to loose the geotargeting strenght of the ccTlds, but you acquire a stronger domain authority for those sites which were maybe struggling alone. Then, if you plan a correct and effective Content Marketing/Link Building strategy, you can add links to those country targeting subcarpets, links which will benefits all the site as an all.
-
It's hard to argue the contrary when Matt Cutts is saying "Go with CCTLDs", but I get the feeling that his point is an "all things being equal" explanation.
My problem is that all things are not equal. I have a mixed bag. I have an old strong .com (DA 90) and a long list of newer less strong domains (down to DA 27)
Re: one site ranking in multiple countries. Our .com already does this. As one example, the .com homepage ranks on the first page for one of our main head keywords in google.fr, whereas the highest ranking page on the .fr for the same keyword is at the top of page 3.
So "losing a ton of ground" doesn't make a lot of sense here, because traffic isn't going to gravitate towards local content if it's already lingering down around the third page. Wouldn't it make more sense here, to have a french language version of the homepage on the .com and use hreflang to make sure that's the version that ends up in French search results?
I know that 301's don't pass all authority, but they pass some, my feeling is that 13 sites-worth of redirection will have a strong effect on an already strong .com.
Microsoft apply this exact model (one .com, multiple languages in subdirectories, relevant results in local search) and ok, they have a strong domain, but doesn't this show that this is possible?
It would be great to hear about actual experience of similar consolidation moves, successes or failures?
-
I wouldn't drop a ccTLD to move to a .com. There are several benefits you lose
- Most engines recognize ccTLDs as specific to a given country. This can help with ranking for those engines in that country
- Traffic from specific countries tends to gravitate towards a ccTLD (i.e. French are more likely to click on a .fr)
- Engines tend to give a pass on duplicate content to ccTLDs. See Matt Cutts on point.
You're going to lose a ton of ground doing this. Trying to make one site rank well for multiple countries is hard enough. Add in the lost rank from your ccTLDs (a 301 doesn't move all PR).
-
Any time you 301 content it's going to take search engine a while to catch up. You may run into issues with duplicate content for countries that speak all the same langue such as the UK and the USA.
However I had recently read the if you rel=canonical the old page to the new locations it speeds up the indexing process. I'll see if I can find the link for you when i get home later.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Switching from Http to Https, but what about images and image link juice?
Hi Ya'll. I'm transitioning our http version website to https. Important question: Do images have to have 301 redirects? If so, how and where? Please send me a link or explain best practices. Best, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1241 -
Is there an advantage to using rel=canonical rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)?
Is there an advantage to using link rel=alternate (as recommended by Google) rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)? The content on the mobile pages is very similar to the content on the desktop site. I see Google recommends canonical and alternate tags, but what are the benefits of using those rather than noindex?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jennifer.new0 -
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
Switching site from non-www to www
Howdy folks, I've got a website that is roughly 3 months old. I created it as a naked URL as I often prefer the look but I've noticed that a lot of my competition has www and also some of my clients seem to prefer it as well. I feel like switching it to www will be of long-term benefit for my site. The problem is that I currently have several pages with first page rankings and a backlinks. I am wondering what the negative effects of switching it to www would be, and how I can minimize any issues. I am guessing I should do a redirect, and I have access to some of the backlinks so I can change those as well, but is there anything else? Thoughts? I appreciate the feedback!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswesleyhunt1 -
Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?
Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present. I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions? Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects) They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed. The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages. The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language. Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues. Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt Canonical URLs are good Site has about 20K pages indexed They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped. I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences. It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site. Page load speed is good I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
New my domain.com/blog option vs. my blog.mydomain.com option
Our e-commerce site has been on Big Commerce for about a year now. One thing many SEO folks had told us is that having a blog located at /blog was going to help more than a subdomain blog. option. BC has never had the option to have a blog hosted on their platform (/blog) until now. I am now wondering, since we have lost traffic in the past and are trying everything we can to regain it, if we should purchase the Wordpress Site Redirect upgrade and move the subdomain blog (blog.) to the new site option /blog. Any help or feedback from you is very much appreciated. I have attached a screenshot of our main website vs. our blog from Open Site Explorer in case it helps anything. I29Tw5P
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh3300 -
Big hit to traffic a while ago, and slow recovery. Is there anything we've missed?
www.movehub.com We took a big hit to our organic traffic when we implemented an HTML form which included a list of every country in the world, twice. This rolled out onto every page on our website. And it got indexed by Google (webmaster tools showed our content keywords as being those from the form occurring 9000+ times on the site) We've fixed this and the content keywords are back to normal, however our traffic has not yet fully recovered. Is there anything on our site that you think could be sending spam signals to Google, or could be impeding our organic traffic growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyCatlow0 -
How do i redirect www.domain.com/ to www.domain.com/index.php
I keep getting in my analytics www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com/index.php how do i make it consistently redirect to one version and not to both. I know about htaccess redirect and am already using this so am puzzle to which is the best one to use. below is the example .htaccess file im using. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattmillen
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.co.uk [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php$1 [r=301,nc] which is better for SEO should i forward to www.domain.com/ or www.domain.com/index.php0