Moving back to .com site

[BruceA]

Hi

Many thanks for all the input we have had from the Moz expert team here.  We have had some great thoughts and we have finally decided that we need to move our site to an new provider and to go back to one single .com site for all our global traffic, as we cannot get round possible duplicate pages as we cannot use canonical nor alternate links with our current website provider and this has meant a big rethink in the last couple of weeks.

We where running two sites, .com which has been running for 7 years and a .co.uk site which was dormant since 2007 until 2013 and used from last year to serve our local customers.

Domain Authority for .com 19 and 23 for .co.uk

Our new site will serve 3 currencies so we can offer £ $ & € without the need for duplicate pages or local pages.

We plan but are flexible about using a 301 from the .co.uk site to the dot com. and have enough data to ensure we can do all 301 redirects at page level from our current .co.uk site to our new .com site.

Can anyone provide any SEO tips on ensure we grow our rankings when we make the switch in about 3 weeks.

Many thanks

Bruce

[David-Kley]

I would just make sure your planning and implementation is impeccable.

1. Make sure the person doing the redirects is organized and competant, especially if you have a large number of pages.
2. Make sure that your new sitemap contains all the new URLs, so you can get any new content indexed quickly as possible.
3. Try to come up with a "newsworthy" way of stating that you have made the change. Once you have a really nice article written about the change and how it benefits your consumer base, create a high level press release through PR web or the like for distribution.
4. Resubmit the home page and all linking URLs in webmaster under "fetch as google"
5. See how you can combine tracking data from the old site into the new, so you can keep track of mon-mon and year-year progress from the transition.

Thats a good place to start. Other than the basics, content and social shares are going to be what drives in new or additional traffic.

[GPainter]

Planning is a must, you can start rebranding asap so users start to go to .com before you move. Also you can try to get in touch with links to get them changed rather than a 301 so the links are direct.  You can also start redirecting bits of your site rather than all at once so if anything goes wrong your whole site is not affected it gives you time to work kinks out.

Can always do some social outreach really announce the move so you get some more visits sort of concrete the move in place.

Best of luck with the move, make sure you plan and have a plan B and you will be fine!