We have an existing site, let's say www.xyz.com --- which attracts traffic from all over the world (including the US), though it's primary audience is the UK/ Europe. Most of this traffic is via organic search results on Google. Now, there is a business case to launch a US-centric website -- www.xyz.us, which will have most of its content from the original site (probably with some localization). Our goal is that on day 1 when the new site xyz.us is launched, we want all traffic originating from the US (and may be some other North American countries) to be directed to the .us domain instead of the .com domain. We don't want to lose any search engine traffic; equally importantly, we want this to be done in a manner that is seen by the search engines as a legitimate technique. Can you suggest a suitable approach for this?
You might be interested in ONE of below two options: (1) If you are not going to keep xyz.com anymore & shifting to new domain xyz.us... then apply 301 redirect and set "address change" in google webmaster tool. This will remove xyz.com from Google's database and put all credit earned by xyz.com into xyz.us. (2) If you are making xyz.us live temporarily then use 302 redirect. This will keep giving xyz.com as priority site, ranks will stay, and it only take visitors to xyz.us. Don't take it as permanent thing, you have to remove xyz.us after some time and let the visitors see xyz.com again.
Thank you Mr. Kumar for your generous reply. We want to keep our xyz.com as well with the xyz.us domain but not want to use 302 redirect, as 302 redirect is not a legitimate way to direct the traffic. Any other idea?
Now I got the situation. You want xyz.us for us visitors, and xyz.com for rest of the world. Then you need to apply visitor location detection script on xyz.com and redirect visitors to xyz.us if visitor is from usa. You may consider something like- http://www.geobytes.com/geodirection.htm But make sure your ranks should go from xyz.com to xyz.us to us google only. Need deeper look.