Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Changing from .com to .com.au
-
Hi All, we are looking for some guidance please, if at all possible. We have .com domain (the domain is older than 10 years), we have been using it for 2 years. We also have .com.au version of the domain (the domain is 2 years old, pointing to the .com domain) and isn't being used. We are an Australian based company. Our question is, should we be using .com.au instead of .com and if so, how would you advise going about doing the change over without having huge SEO impact on our business (negatively). We are on the home page for most of the searches we have optimized for, but we are always below the .com.au's - which is why we are considering the possibility of the move? Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated
-
Thank you for your feed back. Sorry for timely response I am inundated with work and have had an ill 2 two year old and Telsta line outage ( Aussie service provider ).
I have chosen to stay with the .com mainly because I am starting to get weekly responses from google searches and actually just closed a big deal from someone who found us on google. So if it works don't to change it. I do agree with focusing on local links, which is what I have been doing over the past 4 - 6 weeks and it has increase our local ranking lately. Going to focus on that and build on local linking. According to Moz Search Visibility in the past two weeks we have had a higher visibility result than our competitors. As far as my international search result go that's an added bonus but not our main focus.
All our hard work on SEO for our website seems to be paying off now. So going to stay with the .com than risk the move.
Thank you. -
I see that you already decided to stick with the .com domain.
It's fine, albeit a conservative choice, even though I would have started considering more seriously the idea of migrating to a .com.au domain name if - as you say - you're struggling vs those ccTlds domains, which outrank you even if objective factors (link profile, DA, PA) are better in your case.
I say it because of the lift effect a ccTld may mean: given parity of pondered factor, one ranking signal improved can provide you a big positive change.
However, I agree with you that migrating your domain may be a risk because of all the things that can go wrong during a migration.
Therefore, look at others geotargeting signals. For instance, look at from where your backlinks are coming. You say you have clients from all over the world, therefore I suspect that you target the global market also when creating the link profile of your site, and considered less important earning links from local websites or sites targeting your region.
Maybe you should start targeting more also those sites, so to give a clear geotargeting sitgnal to Google.
Obviously, this is a generic suggestion, as I don't know that much about your site and niche, but remember: international SEO is not just about domain terminations and geo-targeting in Search Console, but also many others signals, being the origin of inbound links one of the most relevant ones.
-
Hi Verve,
Sorry haven't responded straight away. My two year has been very ill and consumed all of my time. Firstly thank you for your response.My answer to John above would pretty much the same to yours so not going to copy paste.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I think .com is worth sticking with because of current ranking I have had three leads in the last two days from my rankings, but I do believe I am falling short one top spots because of the .com / .au difference. After a lot of consideration, pro's vs cons I think its best to stick with the .com changing to .com.au I think will have to much of a negative ranking response and may take 6 months to a year to recover.
Thank you again for taking the time to response. Enjoy the rest of your week! -
Hi John,
Sorry haven't responded straight away. My two year has been very ill and consumed all of my time. Firstly thank you for your response.I'm in the top three - eight for most searches and when using location specific ( Gold Coast ) then we are number one, two or three. It just seems we fighting against .com.au domain rather than design quality or content source for the top spots.
We do have clients in Canada, UK, Saudi, South Africa & China but our focus is the Australian market, everything else is a bonus.
I have given it sooo much thought and I keep believing .com is the one to stick with but I am left with the .com.au doubt over ranking top positioning within Australia.
Thank you. -
HI Kevin,
I also agree with what John said above. " depends on how you set up the .com."
In summary, there are no TLDs ( Top Level Domain .com. .org etc ) that Google finds preferential to others; they are all treated equally in rankings. There are some geo-specific TLDs ( Like yours ) that Google will default to a specific country and use that as an indicator that the website is more important in a specific geographic region. But all TLDs are treated equally.
Ref: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/googles-handling-of-new-top-level.html
If you think your ranking is due to .com? then you need have clear competitors analysis metrics before switching from .com to .com.au . But For sure it will have impact.
-
It depends on your customer and how you set up the .com.
Have you selected an geo-targeting for your website? This article could be of assistance https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en
Also is your customer based solely in Australia? If your customer is only Australia based it maybe worth considering a change. Need more data. ie is Australia, the State or town in the Title visible on each search?
Also for the sites ranking above you - need more competitive analysis, than .au as the possible cause. Worthy discussion.
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
-
Is there a benefit to changing .com domain to .edu?
Hey All! I'm wondering if there is any benefit (or if benefit could possibly outweigh the cost) to changing a domain from .com to a new .edu domain. The current .com domain has decent credibility already, and the .edu will have never been used before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | frankandmaven1 -
Will changing category URLs on site hurt SEO?
Hi Moz Community, We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it. Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise. We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu. So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced. My questions are: If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page? Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way? Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow? Thanks so much for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaraLP1 -
.com or other TLD?
Hi, We are in the process of considering our domain url options for a new site. The plan is to migrate other site (bringing their link juice) to an main brand level domain. At the moment our desired .com url is unattainable however from a band perspective another extension e.g (.group) would probably be a better brand fit - however I wanted to know what the implications might be from an SEO perspective. At the moment some of our sub domains are ranking extremely well for desired keywords. Assuming we implement the correct redirect rules to maintain these rankings, would there be any other implication for our rankings (particularly in the UK and US) for not using a .com domain and using an alternatve TLD extension. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carlsutherland0 -
URL structure change and xml sitemap
At the end of April we changed the url structure of most of our pages and 301 redirected the old pages to the new ones. The xml sitemaps were also updated at that point to reflect the new url structure. Since then Google has not indexed the new urls from our xml sitemaps and I am unsure of why. We are at 4 weeks since the change, so I would have thought they would have indexed the pages by now. Any ideas on what I should check to make sure pages are indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ang0 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
Combine .com and .co.uk domain? So forward .co.uk to .com for SEO?
Hello, A new client of mine has an .com and an .co.uk domain. Both the same content (and they don't have the capacity to make specific content on both domains). I am thinking building al domain authority to 1 domain. In this case the .com domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
And forward the .co.uk to this .com domain.
In this way, the .com will rank in both UK as in other English speaking countries, right? Or not?
Or should I use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag? I am not sure. But I do know big brands rank high in the Netherlands with .com domains (for example booking.com). Looking forward on feedback on best practices here... Thanks!0 -
Recent Algo Change
I was wondering if anybody can shed some light on any recent changes to the Google algorithm in Australia. A competitor, www.manwithavan.com.au has always been number 1 for the most competitive search term in our industry "removalists melbourne". However, in the last week, they have fallen out of the the SERPS and are now (according to MOZ) ranking outside the top 50. As far as l can tell, they have a really well optimized site with good structure, great text and updated content. They are very active within social media circles and have some really good external links. Can anybody tell me why they would have been hit so badly. The reason l ask is that i want to make sure we don't make the same mistake. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield1 -
Linking Sister-Sites - Diapers.com Example
Many of the big guns like 1800 Flowers, Diapers.com and others all have their sister sites in tabs at the top. Example: http://www.diapers.com/ with their 3 other properties. Since all properties link to one another on every page, it's really a wash, right? No real gain as engines know they are connected and it's the same link multiple times. No real problem either as it's natural for the user experience to have reciprocal links here between the brands. Any additional thoughts here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOPA0
