Impact issues when switching from .com to uk
-
Buon Giorno from wetherby UK 5 degrees C and rivers bursting their banks everywhere
This site http://www.sandtoft.com/ has requested a switch in url forwardfing in that they want the following to happen:
When u enter the .com url it forwards to the .co.uk domain (the opposite from what it is today ie when you eneter .co.uk it switches to the .com url)
So my question is please...
"Will changing the .com url to .co.uk via forwarding affect SERPS in any significant manner" My view is the impact will be a minor dip in the serps followed by a recovery.
Any insights welcome
-
They already have Google confused and they are serving up .co.uk pages in the index
I agree with the move for a UK site to have a co.uk domain just make sure you are doing it accress the board, properly forwarding the .com and updating all sitemap.xml files and internal navigation
P.S.
-
block your plugins folder in robots.txt
-
check webmaster tools for duplicate title tags and make them all unique
-
Optimize your title tag you have <title><a class="l" href="http://www.sandtoft.co.uk/resource-centre/photo-gallery/photo-gallery-images/?photoID=634&DSID=12">Sandtoft Roof Tiles - Photo Gallery Images</title>
should be something more like <title><strong>Grey Slate Roof Tiles</strong> | Sandtroft Tile Store</title>
with the description of the tile at the beginning of the tag, not the name of the company, that's your domain name you'll already rank for that.
-
-
I did a similar thing not too long ago (maybe 9 months ago) for a friend. To cut a long story short he only usually averaged 50 visitors a day coming on to his website from Google and about 400 visitors as direct traffic. He ran a large scale offline marketing campaign and the printers managed to screw up his domain name so he wanted to do the same thing as your client.
I anticipated a similar effect to what you expect in that SERPS might drop slightly but then recover. However, his 50 visitors a day dropped to around 25 a day for 3 months and all his rankings (not that there were many terms he ranked for anyway!) dropped off quite badly. After 3 months, they recovered quite well apart from one search term.
I think on a larger scale operation such as yours, the data and figures might represent a real life answer a little more than my data set on such a small scale website... Due to this its hard to say whether you will see a similar effect on your clients website.
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
-
Http://newsite.intercallsystems.com/vista-series/sales@intercallsystems.com
I keep getting crawl errors for urls that have email addresses on the end. I have no idea what these are. Here is an example: the-audio-visual-system/sales@intercallsystems.com Where would these be coming from, how are they created? How can i fix them? When I try to do a 301 redirect it doesn't work. Thanks for your help,
Technical SEO | | renalynd27
Rena0 -
Setting up a site with different extensions (.co.uk and .com)
hi i am setting up a new site but have bought two domains to cover those who may type the wrong version. So i have: regionwithchildren.co.uk and regionwithchildren.com i am just setting up both on my wordpress host with a coming soon page (to include social links and sign up form). but had a few questions: as the main site is .co.uk should i just set up a redirect from the .com to the .co.uk as the root folders on the two will be the same (regionwithchildren) i need to change one as host cant have two identical - what should i change the .com one to? any other considerations for this kind of set up would be much appreciated? thanks neil
Technical SEO | | neilhenderson0 -
PageSpeed Insights DNS Issue
Hi Anyone else having problems with Google's Pagespeed tool? I am trying to benchmark a couple of my sites but, according to Google, my sites are not loading. They will work when I run them through the test at one point but if I try again, say 15 mins later, they will present the following error message An error has occured DNS error while resolving DOMAIN. Check the spelling of the host, and ensure that the page is accessible from the public Internet. You may refresh to try again. If the problem persists, please visit the PageSpeed Insights mailing list for support. This isn't too much an issue for testing page speed but am concerned that if Google is getting this error on the speed test it will also get the error when trying to crawl and index the pages. I can confirm the sites are up and running. I the sites are pointed at the server via A-records and haven't been changed for many weeks so cannot be a dns updating issue. Am at a loss to explain. Any advice would be most welcome. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
404 issues
Hello, Some time ago, something like a month and a half) I have removed all 404 errors from the google index and the webmaster tools have removed them already, however yesterday moz found the same 404 errors that i have removed from indexing (tose pages are deleted or redirected by the site developer). What could be an issue here and why webmaster tools are not registering those 404 errors but moz analytics does. And the other question is if those pages do not exist can i track where the placed? I tried dowloading moz crawl test, but the refering source was not provided. I would highly appreciate anyones help. Thank you
Technical SEO | | rikomuttik0 -
Rip Off Report.com?
Who has had dealing with Rip Off Report.com They posted a "rip off report" about my client. At the top of the site it has a banner to hire an SEO that can get rid of this "negative online reputation." Black Hat?
Technical SEO | | JML11790 -
Facebook Like button issue
In looking through my top pages in Google Analytics, my #2 page (oddly enough) looked like this "/?fb_xd_fragment=". Apparently, this is because we added the Facebook Like button to many of our pages. But I'm worried these show very skewed PageView data and lower Time Spent on each page. The average time on this page is 5 seconds whereas the average sitewide time is much higher. Further, it shows 9,000 pageviews coming from only 250 Unique Visitors. I'm sure this is messing with our SEO. Is there a fix for this? Should I even be worried about it? I heard that I can remove it from my GA stat reporting, but I don't want it to be causing problems in the background. Please advise..my boss wants to keep the Facebook Like button the pages as it has brought us some good response. The page that this is on is: www.accupos.com Maybe there's an alternate version of the Facebook Like that we don't know about... I would appreciate any help on this DM
Technical SEO | | DerekM880 -
Having some weird crawl issues in Google Webmaster Tools
I am having a large amount of errors in the not found section that are linked to old urls that haven't been used for 4 years. Some of the ulrs being linked to are not even in the structure that we used to use for urls. Never the less Google is saying they are now 404ing and there are hundreds of them. I know the best way to attack this is to 301 them, but I was wondering why all of these errors would be popping up. I cant find anything in the google index searching for the link in "" and in webmaster tools it shows unavailable as where these are being linked to from. Any help would be awesome!
Technical SEO | | Gordian1 -
Does anyone see benefit in .com/en vs .com/uk for a UK site?
The client is already on /en and in my opinion there is not much to be gained by switching to /uk
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0