Blogspot redirection issue (Pages from UK)

A few months back, I used the custom domain feature of blogspot to direct the URL to a .com domain . This was going well until it basically dawned on me that the site primarily related to a UK audience, and hence this is causing a problem.

The site is hosted at blogspot so effectively is hosted in the US. I am using a .com domain as opposed to a UK one, and so on. I have designated the UK as the target audience in google webmaster tools, but that hasn't changed anything thus far, as most factors don't heavily point towards the site being aimed at a UK audience.

My intention now is to register a .co.uk domain to solve this problem once and for all. The problem is that I'm unsure of how to go about this. If I redirect the custom blogspot settings straight to a new .co.uk domain I'll lose all of .com traffic and inbound links. I assume that I need to set up a redirect of all existing pages at the .com domain to the .co.uk domain using a 301? Could I instead redirect all pages of the .com domain to the front page of the new .co.uk page, as this would be easier to achieve? I am wary of harming my ranking by making a wrong move.

 

If that's too much to read, in short, my blog is currently at blog.example.com . It is redirected to this site using the blogspot custom domain service.

I now wish for my blog to be redirected to example.co.uk , but want to make sure that this process is smooth, and redirects all pages effectively.

 

hmmm this case is complicated, maybe I'll subscribe first to find the answer

 

Yes, I'll try to break it down, because I don't think I've done a fantastic job of explaining it.

The site was originally at WEBSITE.blogspot.com . I thought this looked a little unprofessional, so I moved it to WEBSITE.COM . It eventually dawned on me that this was mostly a UK themed site (should've dawned on me earlier), but as the blog is hosted on a .com and hosted by blogspot (in america of course), I do not feature in "pages from the UK" searches.

Does anyone know how I can address this issue, but also no lose the link juice I've gathered at the previous .COM address?

The only solution I can see is to buy the .CO.UK version of the domain and redirect the traffic there. Only surely this would be quite complicated due to the existing setup? How would I redirect visitors from the existing pages of the .COM site to the new and correlating pages of a .CO.UK site?