Questions created by dipunm
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Moving .com to .co.uk without compromising .com
Hey guys, I have spent a little time searching for a suitable solution, but I feel like maybe directly asking my specific question is the best way to go about this: We have a site www.mywebsite.com and it serves all UK customers (right now, the site is useless for US customers). We would like to move those customers to www.mywebsite.co.uk and carry all the google points we have accrued with it but unfortunately, I feel like a 301 redirect would cause a big issue because in January, we want to launch a new site which will have very similar if not the same urls but the content will target our new US customers. I don't want to end up in a position where our customers end up with redirect loops or where we end up confusing customers. For now, our solution is this: make our site available on both .com and .co.uk canonical tags on both sites will be set to the UK version of the site. if the user enters the homepage on .com, we show a page saying: "hey, we are launching a US site soon, click here to read more and sign up, or click here to go to the UK site." - this page will not have a UK canonical tag because it has no equivalent on the UK site. If the user clicks on the "goto uk site" button, they have acknowledged that we have 2 sites now and we can 302 redirect them to the equivalent .co.uk page every time they go to .com until we get .com live (powered by a cookie). -- we hope that bots won't be affected by this. It would be good to know if it will affect bots or have any negative SEO side effects. at this point, we have 2 types of users, informed and uninformed users. Informed if they clicked the button described above. if the user enters any other page on .com, we don't redirect uninformed users, we just let them use the site as normal because we don't know if 302 redirects will cause issues for our ranking. if the user enters any other page on .com, we redirect informed users to the .co.uk site... this includes the .com homepage If the user goes to .co.uk, the site is normal. No special landing pages, no redirects, no extra cookies. We want to start changing external .com links to .co.uk and new content we write about our site will start going to .co.uk When .com goes live, we will remove the redirects and people using .com will start seeing US content instead of UK content. People using co.uk will be unaffected. Hopefully, google is directing most of our customers to .co.uk by now. Ideally, we want to transfer our google ranking from .com to .co.uk since it is technically a move, but I need to be sure there will be no side effects from using 301 redirects when we put the US site live... Both SEO wise and UX wise. Anyways, does anyone see any potential problems with our current plan? are 302's problematic for our SEO goals (moving .com points to .co.uk)? will changing canonical from .com to .co.uk have positive or negative effects? Can we safely apply 301's and is it necessary... esp. considering the short timeline (releasing US in Janurary). Are there any extra steps we can take to maximise our efforts and/or speed up the site transfer. Is it a bad idea to allow .com to serve the same content as .co.uk except the homepage? Any gotchas you can think of? Thanks in advance, Dipun
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