New Website. Changing TLD or not?

[SEO_ACSI]

Hi,

At my company we are making a new website because the days of the old one are numbered. We already decided that the folder structure will be changed so we have more "clean" url's.

Now we also would like to change from .net/nl to .nl . Since we already are redirecting all url's (>10.000), we think this is the moment to switch the TLD.

What do you guys think? Is their anyone who has some kind of experience/tip they would like to share?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Ivo,

I've heard second hand (from respected SEOs) that when they switched TLD's it took much longer to recover full rankings traffic - but this was only one case and I'm suspicious to trust it.

Generally, if you follow proper procedure for domain migration, including submitting sitemaps for both your old and new urls and also building new links shortly after the switch, you should see minimal loss in traffic.

SEOgadget has a nice case study they did a short time ago, although I believe they maintained the same TLD.

Changing both the folder structure and the TLD at the same time does complicate things and adds a degree of uncertainty, but it's better to have one 301 redirect instead of making a chain, so perhaps it's best to make the entire change at once.

[onwebtoday]

Using clean urls will make your website rank higher in SERPs.

Using  301 redirects for all old urls to respective new urls is a good idea.

I had the some loss of traffic when switched to a cTLD than gTLD. If using cTLD of .nl your website will rank better in google.co.nl but rank lower in Google.com.

Based on the location of the visitors you need, you can switch the TLD.