Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Changing from .com to .com.au
-
Hi All, we are looking for some guidance please, if at all possible. We have .com domain (the domain is older than 10 years), we have been using it for 2 years. We also have .com.au version of the domain (the domain is 2 years old, pointing to the .com domain) and isn't being used. We are an Australian based company. Our question is, should we be using .com.au instead of .com and if so, how would you advise going about doing the change over without having huge SEO impact on our business (negatively). We are on the home page for most of the searches we have optimized for, but we are always below the .com.au's - which is why we are considering the possibility of the move? Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated
-
Thank you for your feed back. Sorry for timely response I am inundated with work and have had an ill 2 two year old and Telsta line outage ( Aussie service provider ).
I have chosen to stay with the .com mainly because I am starting to get weekly responses from google searches and actually just closed a big deal from someone who found us on google. So if it works don't to change it. I do agree with focusing on local links, which is what I have been doing over the past 4 - 6 weeks and it has increase our local ranking lately. Going to focus on that and build on local linking. According to Moz Search Visibility in the past two weeks we have had a higher visibility result than our competitors. As far as my international search result go that's an added bonus but not our main focus.
All our hard work on SEO for our website seems to be paying off now. So going to stay with the .com than risk the move.
Thank you. -
I see that you already decided to stick with the .com domain.
It's fine, albeit a conservative choice, even though I would have started considering more seriously the idea of migrating to a .com.au domain name if - as you say - you're struggling vs those ccTlds domains, which outrank you even if objective factors (link profile, DA, PA) are better in your case.
I say it because of the lift effect a ccTld may mean: given parity of pondered factor, one ranking signal improved can provide you a big positive change.
However, I agree with you that migrating your domain may be a risk because of all the things that can go wrong during a migration.
Therefore, look at others geotargeting signals. For instance, look at from where your backlinks are coming. You say you have clients from all over the world, therefore I suspect that you target the global market also when creating the link profile of your site, and considered less important earning links from local websites or sites targeting your region.
Maybe you should start targeting more also those sites, so to give a clear geotargeting sitgnal to Google.
Obviously, this is a generic suggestion, as I don't know that much about your site and niche, but remember: international SEO is not just about domain terminations and geo-targeting in Search Console, but also many others signals, being the origin of inbound links one of the most relevant ones.
-
Hi Verve,
Sorry haven't responded straight away. My two year has been very ill and consumed all of my time. Firstly thank you for your response.My answer to John above would pretty much the same to yours so not going to copy paste.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I think .com is worth sticking with because of current ranking I have had three leads in the last two days from my rankings, but I do believe I am falling short one top spots because of the .com / .au difference. After a lot of consideration, pro's vs cons I think its best to stick with the .com changing to .com.au I think will have to much of a negative ranking response and may take 6 months to a year to recover.
Thank you again for taking the time to response. Enjoy the rest of your week! -
Hi John,
Sorry haven't responded straight away. My two year has been very ill and consumed all of my time. Firstly thank you for your response.I'm in the top three - eight for most searches and when using location specific ( Gold Coast ) then we are number one, two or three. It just seems we fighting against .com.au domain rather than design quality or content source for the top spots.
We do have clients in Canada, UK, Saudi, South Africa & China but our focus is the Australian market, everything else is a bonus.
I have given it sooo much thought and I keep believing .com is the one to stick with but I am left with the .com.au doubt over ranking top positioning within Australia.
Thank you. -
HI Kevin,
I also agree with what John said above. " depends on how you set up the .com."
In summary, there are no TLDs ( Top Level Domain .com. .org etc ) that Google finds preferential to others; they are all treated equally in rankings. There are some geo-specific TLDs ( Like yours ) that Google will default to a specific country and use that as an indicator that the website is more important in a specific geographic region. But all TLDs are treated equally.
Ref: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/googles-handling-of-new-top-level.html
If you think your ranking is due to .com? then you need have clear competitors analysis metrics before switching from .com to .com.au . But For sure it will have impact.
-
It depends on your customer and how you set up the .com.
Have you selected an geo-targeting for your website? This article could be of assistance https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en
Also is your customer based solely in Australia? If your customer is only Australia based it maybe worth considering a change. Need more data. ie is Australia, the State or town in the Title visible on each search?
Also for the sites ranking above you - need more competitive analysis, than .au as the possible cause. Worthy discussion.
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
-
Redirect Issue - Drop in ranking after CMS change
Hi Website - https://www.aasprint.com.au/ After we moved the site from wordpress to codeIgniter + angular there has been a huge drop in traffic and ranking. One of the thing we recently realized is the redirection - COULD THAT BE THE ISSUE? On the browser and sitemap the URL doesn't have "/" at the end When checked on redirection tool the URL seems to be redirecting to one with "/" at the end Attached are the screenshots. Also moz bar shows no redirection. However, the issue seems to be flagged by the site audit tool as 301 redirection. Not sure if it's the cause for the drop. What action to take? Any advice would be much appreciated. V7CNtqt j3dJ4TW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bhisshaun0 -
Change Google's version of Canonical link
Hi My website has millions of URLs and some of the URLs have duplicate versions. We did not set canonical all these years. Now we wanted to implement it and fix all the technical SEO issues. I wanted to consolidate and redirect all the variations of a URL to the highest pageview version and use that as the canonical because all of these variations have the same content. While doing this, I found in Google search console that Google has already selected another variation of URL as canonical and not the highest pageview version. My questions: I have millions of URLs for which I have to do 301 and set canonical. How can I find all the canonical URLs that Google has autoselected? Search Console has a daily quota of 100 or something. Is it possible to override Google's version of Canonical? Meaning, if I set a variation as Canonical and it is different than what Google has already selected, will it change overtime in Search Console? Should I just do a 301 to highest pageview variation of the URL and not set canonicals at all? This way the canonical that Google auto selected might get redirected to the highest pageview variation of the URL. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDCMarketing0 -
Changed all external links to 'NoFollow' to fix manual action penalty. How do we get back?
I have a blog that received a Webmaster Tools message about a guidelines violation because of "unnatural outbound links" back in August. We added a plugin to make all external links 'NoFollow' links and Google removed the penalty fairly quickly. My question, how do we start changing links to 'follow' again? Or at least being able to add 'follow' links in posts going forward? I'm confused by the penalty because the blog has literally never done anything SEO-related, they have done everything via social and email. I only started working with them recently to help with their organic presence. We don't want them to hurt themselves at all, but 'follow' links are more NATURAL than having everything as 'NoFollow' links, and it helps with their own SEO by having clean external 'follow' links. Not sure if there is a perfect answer to this question because it is Google we're dealing with here, but I'm hoping someone else has some tips that I may not have thought about. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagJeff0 -
After Server Migration - Crawling Gets slow and Dynamic Pages wherein Content changes are not getting Updated
Hello, I have just performed doing server migration 2 days back All's well with traffic moved to new servers But somehow - it seems that w.r.t previous host that on submitting a new article - it was getting indexed in minutes. Now even after submitting page for indexing - its taking bit of time in coming to Search Engines and some pages wherein content is daily updated - despite submitting for indexing - changes are not getting reflected Site name is - http://www.mycarhelpline.com Have checked in robots, meta tags, url structure - all remains well intact. No unknown errors reports through Google webmaster Could someone advise - is it normal - due to name server and ip address change and expect to correct it automatically or am i missing something Kindly advise in . Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Robots.txt - Do I block Bots from crawling the non-www version if I use www.site.com ?
my site uses is set up at http://www.site.com I have my site redirected from non- www to the www in htacess file. My question is... what should my robots.txt file look like for the non-www site? Do you block robots from crawling the site like this? Or do you leave it blank? User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/video-sitemap.xml
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | morg454540 -
Change url structure and keeping the social media likes/shares
Hi guys, We're thinking of changing the url structure of the tutorials (we call it knowledgebase) section on our website. We want to make it shorter URL so it be closer to the TLD. So, for the convenience we'll call them old page (www.domain.com/profiles/profile_id/kb/article_title) and new page (www.domain.com/kb/article_title) What I'm looking to do is change the url structure but keep the likes/shares we got from facebook. I thought of two ways to do it and would love to hear what the community members thinks is better. 1. Use rel=canonical I thought we might do a rel=canonical to the new page and add a "noindex" tag to the old page. In that way, the users will still be able to reach the old page, but the juice will still link to the new page and the old pages will disappear from Google SERP and the new pages will start to appear. I understand it will be pretty long process. But that's the only way likes will stay 2. Play with the og:url property Do the 301 redirect to the new page, but changing the og:url property inside that page to the old page url. It's a bit more tricky but might work. What do you think? Which way is better, or maybe there is a better way I'm not familiar with yet? Thanks so much for your help! Shaqd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShaqD0 -
Recent Algo Change
I was wondering if anybody can shed some light on any recent changes to the Google algorithm in Australia. A competitor, www.manwithavan.com.au has always been number 1 for the most competitive search term in our industry "removalists melbourne". However, in the last week, they have fallen out of the the SERPS and are now (according to MOZ) ranking outside the top 50. As far as l can tell, they have a really well optimized site with good structure, great text and updated content. They are very active within social media circles and have some really good external links. Can anybody tell me why they would have been hit so badly. The reason l ask is that i want to make sure we don't make the same mistake. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield1 -
Will changing a subdirectory name negatively effect local ranking?
We submitted a group of 50+ franchise stores into UBL to fulfill directory listings back in September. We are now looking at changing the some of the URL structure to include city names. Example: website.com/store/store-name(not city) to website.com/location/city-store-name Will changing the subdirectory and resubmitting to the directory aggregators negatively effect their search results? Thanks, Jake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AESEO0