Hi, I’ve got a <.co.uk> rapidweaver site thats does well, with about 10 years good ranking in Google.
I’m thinking of transferring the site to <.com.> Does anyone know the best way of doing this while still retaining all the good SEO I’ve built up? Do I have to do a redirect in the htaccess file for every single page? Or can I just redirect the .co.uk once with the webhosts? The site has fairly large blog, so I’d prefer not to have to redirect every sing blog URL.
Also - what would happen, say the<.com> new site is set up (with redirects) with and someone in the UK searches in for a specific page - would Google retrieve the old .co.uk listing and redirect them - or would Google just start pointing all searches directly to the new .com listing??
I’ve not done this before so any constructive advice would be much appreciated.
James
You should leave your co.uk site alone and redirect the .com to that site.
From memory:
Point the .com DNS to the location of the current .co.uk server using the control panel where your .com is registered.
Then add the following to the current .htaccess file only in the root of the current .co.uk server. Replace domain with your domain name (before the .co.uk). Note .htaccess is normally hidden and create one if one isn’t present. Back it up before making any changes.
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com$ RewriteRule ^/?$ "https\:\/\/www\.domain\.co\.uk$\/" [R=301,L]
What this will do is to redirect www.domain.com and domain.com to www.domain.co.uk in the existing server location.
Note there are lots of version of this htaccess redirect so search around if this doesn’t work or is not what you want.
Your question about a new site is a bit ambiguous. The above is for 1 site, i.e. the current .co.uk site, that any users who enter .com will be redirectd to.
If you are looking to create different content for the .com site then you will need a second new .com site.
Thanks - this is really clear and makes a lot of sense. It’ll be much easier to do it this way round. The new (.com) site would have basically been the same content (as .co.uk) + any new blog posts etc. I thought that if I switch to <.com> I may be able to generate more hits on my blog. That was main motive for switching. Do you think a local domain name is at a disadvantage to an international one?
Thanks Jan, that would be much easier. I thought if I switch to .com then I can generate more traffic
That would depend on many things but I don’t see any harm in adding the .com version. Try it and see. Plenty of other things to worry about.