Technical 301 question
-
Howdy all, this has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to know the communities ideas on this.
We have a .com website which has a little domain authority and is growing steadily. We are a UK business (but have a US office which we will be adapting too soon)
We are ranking better within google.com than we do on google.co.uk probably down to our TLD.
Is it a wise idea to 301 our .com to .co.uk for en-gb enquiries only? Is there any evidence that this will help improve our position? will all the link juice passed from 301s go to our .co.uk only if we are still applying the use of .com in the US?
Many thanks and hope this isn't too complicated!
Best wishes,
Chris -
I'm confused a little
If you are going to be using only one domain, you don't have to use hreflang whatsoever.
If you do decide to kepp both, then you don't have to use hreflag or rewrite rules either, just do backlinks to whatever domains you need and that's it.
-
Have you checked out that tool yet and answered the questions? I can help you with the technical implementation, but need to know what's best for your business first.
-
Hi Charles so keep .com and then leverage hreflang and rewrite rules to - /en-gb and /en-us maybe?
Chris
-
My suggestion stays the same - "either combine two domains in one, or use two and do double work on SEO and backlinks"
If you do decide to combine them, i'd use .com
-
thanks for your input both - so what would be your two cents into how to do this? - we have a .com and want to keep .com as the central point, UK is our prime business so far.
-
- I am not too interested in looking at the UX side for now
Bad-bad-bad-bad idea
- I feel the .com is not ranking as well on google.co.uk because google favours .co.uk offer .com.it will still be ONE website.
Ok, .com is not gonna be favourable to local google domains, because it's "international" as Kate said. And still, the juice is not gonna be redirected from a link, just if you 301 it for en-gb locale. As I was saying before, link is "tied" to whatever domain it's linking, unless it has hreflang.
So, my suggestion is still the same: either combine two domains in one, or use two and do double work on SEO and backlinks.
-
First, please don't ignore UX. That is a big part of how the search engines operate today.
As Charles said, an IP based 301 redirect is a very bad idea. Please, please don't do it. It will only hurt you. Google only crawls from the US, so they will never see the redirect. And as Charles said, US people traveling in the UK would not be able to get to the US site.
Also, like Charles, I am confused. You have 2 domains, but want one. I think that is what you mean. You have .co.uk and .com, but would prefer to have everything on .com. That's possible, in my testings, having a .co.uk is not a guarantee for ranking. It can help search engines understand your target market, but regional TLDs (ccTOLDs) are meant for businesses that only operate in that country, or have content/products/information that is specific to that region.
.com on the other hand is a generic TLD, it is not focused to one country.
If you want the .com to rank better in the UK, there are a few questions I need you to answer. In fact, go here: http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/ and let me know what result you get from those questions. Then I can help you with the technical setup.
-
Hi Charles, we want to ideally have one domain - the .com. To simplify My question is about using 301 to pass link juice to both the .co.uk and the .com, with google.co.uk ranking the .co.uk website and google.com ranking the .com website using 301 rewrite rules. I am not too interested in looking at the UX side for now, this is just purely based on search engine urls and how they get structured, and the reason we want to do this, is because I feel the .com is not ranking as well on google.co.uk because google favours .co.uk offer .com.
it will still be ONE website.
hope that is a little clearer.
-
Howdy, my friend.
This does sound a little complicated.
We have a .com website which has a little domain authority and is growing steadily. We are a UK business (but have a US office which we will be adapting too soon)
We are ranking better within google.com than we do on google.co.uk probably down to our TLD.
From first line it sounds like you have one domain (.com), second line tells me that you got two domains (.co.uk and .com). So, which is it? well, it wouldn't affect my answer, I guess, I'll cover both.
So, let's go step-by-step:
-
Is it a wise idea to 301 our .com to .co.uk for en-gb enquiries only? - No!Because i can be in any part of the world and i can set my browser locale header to whatever i want. Or it can happen automatically due to whatever circumstances. So, let's say I'm travelling from UK to US. My browser is set to en-gb locale, I do my search for your company in US, I get redirected to UK website, even though I want to fing US one - no good. Bad UX
-
Is there any evidence that this will help improve our position? will all the link juice passed from 301s go to our .co.uk only if we are still applying the use of .com in the US? - I combine these two into one answer. Link juice can be passed if crawlers can differentiate locale on a given URL. Here is how they can do it:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en
So, let's say there is a website with link to yours. It's one link. You can't set two "hreflang"s, or "rel"s, or write it in two languages at the same time on the same URL. So, basically you can tell bots to consider that link as a "juice-passer" to only one domain.
Now, is there a good reason for you guys to have two different domains? If it has similar information, style etc., you can combine them into one (use subdomains or subfolders - Matt Cutts video) and pretty much cut efforts in half with double the return
If there is a good reason for you guys to have completely different domains, I would concentrate for building/working/structuring .uk website for UK and .com website for US. It means that you'll have to do two backlink profiles building, two different technical and "another one" (forgot the word
) SEOs and so on.
Hope this helps.
-
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
-
SEO Menu Question
I have a question regarding to the SEO benefits of different types of menus. Recently, I have noticed an increasing number of websites with the sort of menu like at www.sportsdirect.com, where there is only one main dropdown and then everything is a sub-menu of the sub-menus if that makes sense. Is this approach more, less or equal beneficial to what you see at http://www.wiggle.co.uk/ where there are multiple initial dropdown menus? Appreciate the feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
How to 301 redirect all URLs with /? in?
I want to redirect all URLs that have /? in it. Indexed in Google is a bunch of urls lik: mysite.com/?674764 mysite.com/?rtf8y78 I want all these URLs to be redirected to my home page. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Changing a parent category and 301 redirecting
I have a set of three pages that are subpages of a parent. The structure is as follows: mysite.com/directory/personal-widgets mysite.com/directory/commercial-widgets mysite.com/directory/widgets-services The partent page name "directory" really isn't working for where I want these pages to evolve. So I want to change it to "guides" In a world without worrying about google, I would simply change the parent page to guides, so they look like this, and be done with it: mysite.com/guides/personal-widgets But, the obvious problem is that I have external links to the page now. And the pages have a nice PR. And they also have Facebook page Likes and I don't know if I'll lose those. I know that if I should do this I should redirect the pages to the new pages of course. My question is: Will redirecting the old URL to the new URL with a 301 cause anything negative to happen that I might not be expecting? Does Google dislike Redirects for any reason, or understand they are sometimes necessary?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Interesting site migration question.
Hi all. I'm looking for some thoughts on a migrations option we have. At the moment we have two E-Com sites ranking well for some of the same terms. An older site, and a nice new site. The older site is ranking very well for category and product terms, the new one is slowly coming up. Ideally we would like to have one site, the nice new one, and get rid of the old one. If I 301 the old site url's to the new sites will that bring the new site url's into the same position as the old ones? I'm just not sure how this effects sites that are already ranking well. Any ideas are welcomed but I'm really looking for a definitive answer. It's a big decision after all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PASSLtd0 -
Another deduplication question.
Where an existing website has duplicate content issues - specifically the www. and non-www. type; what is the most effective way to inform the searchers and spiders that there is only one page? I have a site where the ecommerce software (Shopfitter 4) allows a fair bit of meta data to be inserted into each product page but I am uncertain, after a couple of attempts to deduplicate some pages, which is the most effective way to ensure that the www related duplication is eliminated sitewide - there is such a solution. I have to own up to having looked at ,htaccess 301 redirects webmaster tools and become increasingly bamboozled by the conflicting advice as to which is the most effective way or combination to get rid of this problem. too olod to learn new tricks I reckon 😉 Your help and clarification would be appreciated as this may help head off more fruitless work.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SkiBum0 -
What happens with a 301 redirected page?
Hi All, What happens with an indexed page that I 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Is it removed from the Google index after a while? Thanks0 -
What Questions to Ask in SEO Interview
Tomorrow morning I have a call with an SEO company interested in doing some work with our company. Its a larger company who do a lot of SEO work, and seem to have good feedback around the place. But we have been very very white hat in our all our our SEO work so far, and some of their wording on their site talks about "Negotiations and acquisitions of link partners".. which gives me the feel they might be a little grey hat.. What are some good questions we should ask these guys to make sure what they are doing is legit, and not going to get us stung for anything? And what sort of work should we get them to do, if we are happy to take care of content creation, on page optimisation and social media activities? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timscullin0 -
Analytics Question?
Is there a way to see in GA traffic from other IP address's. I want to subtract all the times I visit the site from my IP and get a real traffic %.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0