Death of the .co.uk domain name!

Hi Guys,

I need alittle advice from all your SEO and website site guru's out there.

We have a company website thats been online for about 6 years, its a .co.uk domain and over the past 2 years iv noticed alot of changes in search engines (especially international search engines) with regards to positioning and general ranking

It seems that .co.uk domains are now losing alof of rankings and in many cases lost positioning is most .com based search engines. Now this might seem right since its a .co.uk domain but the products we sell is on an international level and over the 6 years we have spent alot of money ensuring this domain name is highly ranked in google.

My question is this. Should we start working with a new domain thats .com or .org and phase out the .co.uk domain to better enable search engine placement as most international search engines are not ranking us well because of the .co.uk.

any advice would be gratefully apprichated.

 

co.uk is crap imo for branding. Not sure whether it ranks lower.

 

yes, im concerned however how long it would take to rank a .com or .org back to the same level as our current .co.uk domain

any advice on this?

 

.co.uk isn't a bad domain if your website/business is based and mainly targets the UK.

 

I agree, I don't think any of the search engines would penalize you for having it over a .com or what not. I do however think people are more reluctant to register .co.uk domains. Well I know for sure I am.

 

How can you be absolutely sure that it's the .co.uk suffix that is causing you to lose places in the rankings? I suspect there are a number of other factors that could play a part in your downward spiral.

 

are there any methods to check if a domain name is "damaged" in any way?

 

I think if you look at it like this it may help you to decide.

So far you have spent £x amount on backlinks etc to get your .co.uk domain where it is today. Now you are thinking of changing to .com so you would have to spend i would imagine something similar to get .com to the same place as .co.uk. With that money do you not think you could get .co.uk to rank higher?

I suppose you need to work out whether it will be a long or short term problem then decide.

 

i don't think has a decisive effect if is co.uk or net , the quality of the site , backlinks make its value, is only better for the uk targeted sites and worst for the rest than a .com or .net

 

obviously when you think about it, if you target international clients, and you want to expand your business, you have the financial resource to do that, then why would you wanna hold back yourself and not to expand the business, as .com brings much more branding and that's what you need, maybe you can even go with a new domain name.

 

Unless it's actually a website only intended for UK persons, .com is a better idea.

 

For the cost of the domains shouldn't you just buy all the different variations?

 

the problem is the domain name we have doesnt have many other variations available without spending plus of £100,000! Which im not looking todo at this point in time. My concern was that a .co.uk domain would hinder our overall results.

I have a .org now and will see how it goes with this.