Hi, We own a .co.uk domain that is 7 years old and had 100s of 1000s of organic links including many authority ones. We ranked 1 for our main key terms and ranked top 5 for lots of others within our sector (about medium competitive in the UK). As part of our strategy we moved to a .com domain. We did the following: 1) Updated Google Webmaster "domain move tool" to say we have moved from .co.uk > .com 2) Updated all of our old .co.uk links to 301 redirects to the correct page on the new .com 3) Updated as many incoming links as can to point to the new .com domain However, today we have seen our excellent rankings drop to the 2nd-3rd pages and beyond and we now only rank for our domain name? Is this normal behaviour and when google realises we have switched domains it will pass all of the good link juice though to the new .com? If so, how long does this usually take? Anything else we can to help the situation? Thanks
All things you did are true and i guess you should wait some days. Maybe it takes some days that Google updates all data about your website and its backlinks. I think it will be solved some days later as redirecting and moving domain can not be done better than what you did.
The drop is inevitable even if you did everything correctly. Because the search engines will have to clear their old caches and reinstate their algorithms for your keywords. Your site should regain its old ranks in 1-4 months. During this period, you will lose most of your search traffic. Your site might lose its rankings permanently or might gain better ranks depending on too many factors. The most important factors are about the new domain; its age, tld, hosting, etc.
Thanks for that! That is frustrating!! The new .com domain is 7 years old and is hosted at rack space on a dedicated server. Shame about the lost SERPS for a few months - that isn't good!!
There must be some vital reasons before changing the domain. It's a risky process. Lost is guaranteed at least for the first few months. Gain is not guaranteed. But I am optimistic for your case. Because your reason is good enough and you know what you are doing. .com is always better than .co.uk. I would change it with .com like you. Don't touch anything and wait patiently. You will be the winner.
I think you took a big risk in changing the domain name. As above posters have said loss is guaranteed and gain even after a few months is not. I did do some redirects for my sites recently, and I too took a SERPs hit but fortunately not too badly. Keep your fingers crossed
I would suggest you start building new links to the .com domain. The links which you updated in point 3 will take time themselves to be reindexed and counted as pointing to the new domain. So if you start adding some new links to the .com web site they will help prevent you from dropping too far whilst Google is updating it's data.
I don't agree with Martin. I don't recommend you to get links for the new .com domain. It might have a big negative effect if Google counts those links as unnatural. This is not a small risk even if the new domain is an aged domain. Because the domain is new for the site and the new incoming links can be suspicious for the first months. I would just wait patiently. If you don't do anything including changing of the site design or hosting the whole process will look like a simple domain change process in the view of Google. It should be what you want exactly.
I wouldnt say .com was better than .co.uk If the guy has been running a website and its targetted to UK people then .co.uk is more effective than .com 100%, I presume it was UK traffic seeing as he had the domain 7+ years, I think to change the domain over from this long a time is bad. If you wanted to break into other markets, US etc which didnt you just setup the .com version and go ahead and do this.. I have several UK sites that have been around years, all .co.uk, when I do well and want to hit america, I wouldnt dream of changing from .co.uk to .com, your losing all those links also, all that hard work, I setup new company with same domain but .com All the best anyway.
If there are 2 companies or branches in 2 different continents, I might agree with you depending on the individual analysis of each business model. For instance, most of the multinational organizations/banks/companies use country TLD's for their branches/franchisors abroad. They seem like agreeing with you in the first look. But it is not related to the advantage of a CC TLD over .com. For those global companies, using country TLD's means using many different domains for many different sites hosted by different servers on different locations. If they use only .com, they would have to host all of the pages on the same server unless they use sub-domains for each country. But they also need to keep their trademarks. So, they have to register all of the CC TLD's. What can they do with those CC versions of their .com domains? Redirecting to the internal pages hosted by the same server or redirecting to the sub-domains hosted by different servers in different countries? CC TLD's are only better than sub-domains and internal pages. I might be wrong on saying ".com is always better than a co.uk.". I see now that sometimes in some rare situations (i.e., for some global organizations) country TLD's are better than .com just because of the limitations of using 1 domain for a few giant companies.
I see, so what your saying is that in the eyes of Google it is un-natural for a business to continue promoting their web site because they have changed domains. If anything it is more natural. The business stops promoting the old site which is now 301 redirected and begins promoting the new site.
I think that in the eyes of Google, promoting a website -except buying ads from Adwords- is unnatural. They just can't determine all of the paid and spam links. Because tracking and determining of paid links must have a cost to Google. Probably they catch PR5+ paid links faster. Spam links might include all of the reciprocal links, social bookmarkings, etc. These type of free promotions and paid links are usually considered unnatural regardless of changing the domain. amaze says his site is receiving organic links. If he says the truth, new natural links should continue for his new domain with no effort.
Ok, lets back up a bit here. I never once advised amaze to buy links or spam for links. I advised him to build links to the .com version of the web site. There are numerous legitimate ways to build links to a web site which don't involve spamming or paying for them. As for your statement on Google. What?!? Surely you cannot think that the only form of promotion Google deems to be natural is their PPC product. That's just crazy, sorry, but it is. Besides which it doesn't even factor into the whole link development scheme of things.
I had a recent experience with the entire domain forwarding. Htaccess and 301 ... It took one month for it to be retaken positions .. And this time I was creating backlinks to the new domain. Over time, the 301 redirect will lose power (correct me if wrong), then the best thing to do is redirect the backlinks.
You should have just registered a new dot com domain for your old co.uk. All of the time spent for your old site is wasted now, it seems you will be starting off again. Hope you can regain the lost rankings after a few months.
So when did you make the switch from .co.uk to .com? a few days ago or a few months ago? I hate to ask the obvious, but since no one else has... did you check the history of the 7 year old .com domain before making the switch? [video=youtube;iKDlEKnT1Ko]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKDlEKnT1Ko[/video] Cheers James
Please search what is the meaning of manipulating of search results and what does Google say about it. Yes there are few trusted methods. Google doesn't create a problem with DMOZ, yahoo directory, digg, youtube and some other links. But what about the other links: Blog posts, blogroll links, directory links, reciprocals, etc? The question is how can we get higher ranks on SERP's without manipulating search results? What is the exact meaning of manipulating according to Google? It is not clear and that's why we can confuse easily about what is permitted or not permitted by Google. How many legit methods do we have? Are these methods quick, effective and easy enough? Can we get a DMOZ link easily and faster? How about Yahoo directory? They ask $299 pear and give us no guarantee even no refund if they don't like our site. Just pay $299 and do not ask anything? How many people put a video on youtube then stay without promoting that video? If we don't promote our videos, can we think that we can get a benefit from youtube for our time? It is same for tweeter, facebook, aol and other social media links. We can't get an enough benefit if we don't pay for promoting our social media links unless we are able to create some real extraordinary contents. If we can create such quality contents, why don't we use our own blogs for posting to keep the 100% revenue from our own quality contents? Then we are returning to the staring point: paid promotion, free promotion and the risk of losing our placements on SERP's. Which one is the safest, fastest and most effective? Adwords?
We are in a similar boat. Just purchased .com to replace the .net. .net holds top SERPs and very reputable. As a strategic brand development move we want to get on the .com What would be the best way to approach the move? Should we set expectations to gain the same SERPs on the .com after 3 months? I'm trying to understand how much of the traffic hit we are going to absorb and where should we invest to minimize the "slow" time?