Do you have access to .htaccess on your server?

You could set a simple redirect to redirect all traffic to your website root to the domain you want.

Try this....  http://www.affiliatebeginnersguide.com/domains/redirection.html

Thanks for the replies both. A bit more investigating will have to be done before we make the final decision.

Hello,

We are looking at creating an eCommerce section to a website and we are just weighing up the options:

1. Magento - host on hour own server - great but it can often be very slow when hosting a shared server.
2. Shopify - hosted solution but hosting is in the US and we are in the UK and shop will be hosted on a subdomain as a result
3. Build our own solution - time consuming and costly

There are two issues that have arisen from this situation....

Is it worse for SEO to host your store in a different country or to host in your country but your store potentially run slower?

I'm swaying to the side of the argument that says give your users a good and fast experience instead of worrying about where you host the store. Bearing in mind that the main website will be hosted in the UK anyway and it is just the subdomain that will be hosted in the US.

Just wondered if anybody has had experience with this or if I'm missing something?

All feedback greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Elias

It will if you add r=301 to the last line like so:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /blog/$1 [L,R=301]

You might want to look into what Google do themselves.

They automatically redirect people in the uk who type in www.google.com to www.google.co.uk

If it's good enough for google it's good enough for us. Just make sure you do not look like you are cloaking.

You need to give users the ability to change language when they are on the website though. As Vince mentioned just because a user is visiting the website from Italy it does not mean that they are Italian.

Hi Jonathan,

This is difficult....You have to balance the benefits for the visitors and the search engines.

Although, having relevant domain names still works for gaining good rankings it is not as powerful as it once was. It may eventually not be part of Google's algorithm at all with future updates.

Due to that fact alone I would go with the short name and concentrate on targeting Vancouver web design on-page and with links. I think this would help to future-proof your website and would be more user friendly.

On a side note - I would avoid hyphenated domain names as it is widely believed that Google uses this as a spam indicator.

I hope this helps!