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Hi - I'm hoping someone can help me resolve an issue in relation to setting up 301 redirects. The client to whom I provide SEO services is being told by his developers that setting up 301 redirects is not achievable from old HTML pages to his new site running on a Windows server. My feeling is that it should be fine, and I have found documentation online that seems to support this, however I'm no developer, certainly no server admin, so I was wondering if anyone could advise me? Is it feasible to set up 301 redirects from Actinic sites (HTML pages) to a new site in NOP commerce running on a Windows server (ASP pages). Thank you for your help! Iain

I would say that you should first try to do this without building out a .fr domain. In your position, and with some experience of this already under my belt, I would look to build pages relevant to France in a /fr folder, and use Webmaster Tools to inform Google that this is where the geographical target for that folder is.

There are many other things to think about, just a few of them are;

1. Filtering of results by the user will have an impact i.e. the search for sites in French/ search for sites in France choice that users will asked to make. It's great that the site shows up in your tests, but maybe it would disappear to some users if it's not hosted in France?

2. You could still buy an appropriate .fr domain, build out a little relevant content hosted in France, link to this from your obviously reasonably authoritative main site and see if you can start to get the new domain to rank and "fill in the blanks".

3. You don't say if you translated the key phrase you used, and I'm assuming translation would be relevant. If it is, and excuse me if this is obvious, you'll need to do all of your keyword research again. Just translating from say, English probably won't cut the mustard.

I seem to recall there was a Whiteboard Friday on this topic quite recently, you should look that up.

My experience fits best with what Robert is saying. Simply purchasing a domain and expecting a benefit from a redirection is likely to lead to disappointment, unless the new domain is so appealing and memorable that you plan to use it elsewhere to grow awareness. Otherwise, you should do some additional work to get any benefit from this. But to answer your question ... it's not a bad idea.

We recently moved a client site from page 3 to page 1 for some keywords in the pcb manufacturing industry by moving the entire site to a new keyword domain, being sure of course to implement 301s, flag the change in Webmaster Tools and so forth. It helped that, bizarrely, this particular client had been sitting on the domain for some time and in fact some of their inbound links already referred to it. The transfer of authority therefore has been smoother than might normally be expected. But since nothing else about the site has changed the jump can really only be attributed to keywords in the domain.