John Mueller Google Hangouts Session: .co.uk and .com Site Migration

Google frequently arranges live Google Hangout sessions online, hosted by its Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, who runs one-on-one sessions with a select group of search specialists.

Dan Picken, of Ingenuity Digital’s sister company WMG, attends these sessions to ensure he’s at the leading edge of search science, asking the questions that will enable us to keep our clients’ businesses fully optimised online.

Site Migration

A client has both the .com and co.uk versions of their site, which are almost identical. They are both live and indexed, but the .co.uk version ranks for all the phrases and the .com site ranks for nothing. The .co.uk version is also the stronger of the two sites (with more links) and also has the blog hosted on the site. However, the client would like to redirect the stronger .co.uk site into the weaker .com site, which is contrary to our advice. In this case wider business goals are more important than their SEO goals.

One of the worries about this approach is the possible implication and potential loss in page rank through more 301 redirects.

John Mueller responded by saying he wouldn’t worry about any loss from the redirects, as it will be a minimal loss. However, a possible implication is with the generic .com vs a country code .co.uk domain. John recommended that if a client is focusing primarily on a UK audience, then sticking with the .co.uk domain will make sense as the domain is geo-targeted. He warned that when any kind of site move is carried out, fluctuations in traffic and rankings will be experienced and it will take time to settle down.