Hi everyone! I will start with the problem overview. There is a site which is available at 4 domain names (stupid but that's what we have). Google considers the site at .co.uk domain to be the main one and indexes its pages and shows in search results. All the rest of the domain names are indexed but partially and they naturally do not appear in search results. The boss now wants a .com domain to appear in Google search results. As I see it there are 2 possible solutions: 1) apply 301 redirect from all the secondary domain names and they will all point to .com website. 2) apply rel="canonical" at all the secondary domain names and they will point to corresponding pages at .com website. + disallow indexing of the secondary domains through robots.txt My question is what is a better variant and what will happen to site positions? If we apply 301 will positions drop? The keywords that we rank for are not highly competitive. Thanks in advance.
Doing a 301 redirect is really your only option. That is Google's recommended solution. Losing position when doing anything is always a real possibility. Google has said in the past that 301 redirecting should preserve the weight of incoming links to the redirected pages, but it is always risky. You can see this for more information: http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
you will lose a little bit of link juice but that cant be helped - I agree a 301 is your only option.
Not sure about that, but i have moved some articles from (a) blog.xitclub.com to (b) blog.mianshahzadraza.com with a 301 redirect. (b) is a fresh blog and i have submitted the sitemap in webmasters too so in few days articles on (b) blog started appearing in google instead of blog (a) and SERP of articles remain same at blog (b) like searching for keyword "css3 close buttons" & "limit wordpress title" my articles are on page first about 3rd or 4th position