moving from .com to .co.uk
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Credit Card Journey Manager at RBS
10 December 2010 15:43pm
Hi, after a dispute we have won the .co.uk domain for my company. However, currently our UK site sits on .com/en, along with some other country sites, whilst some country sites have TLDs.
Given that there'll be numerous bookmarks and limited, although significant natural search positions, could anyone give any guidance on how to ensure that we move across to the new TLD as smoothly as possible.
We will put in a 301 irule on our load balancers which should cover off a lot of the issues but there's probably plenty of pratfalls.
Head of SEO at Search Laboratory
03 January 2011 10:54am
Hi Nathan - a 301 redirect will notify search engine crawlers of the change in URLs.
Google's guidelines on this very issue.
I would also recommend using a tool such as open site explorer or majestic to discover your most important backlinks, then try to get the most important 'juice passing links' repointed to your new domain.
Good Luck!
Jimmy
Director at Watson Hall Ltd
04 January 2011 16:44pm
Yes what Jimmy says is true. Just make sure your team create redirects URL by URL, not just a redirect of everything on the old address to the new domain. The "backlinks" suggested above and other key entry points should be remapped to specific new URLs especially.
And update the status code and/or robots.txt for the old addresses.