Domain redirect and pagerank / search rankings effects...

Hi Everyone,

Got a bit of a problem and not sure what to do. I have a website in Toronto, Canada and it is hosted on a Canadian server close to Toronto as well. I have told google webmaster tools using the geographic location tool that my website is in Canada as well.

I originally registered my domain over a year ago as a .com , mainly for the reasons that most people remember .com better than .ca I believe.

Now I am having a problem where I rank #1 for many good Toronto and area keyword phrases in Google search , but for Google.ca or Canada I am considerably lower. Sometimes 5-20 spots lower.

I am thinking of registering the .ca version of my main site and somehow redirecting the .com to the .ca . Will this finally let google know my website is Canadian? Is there a technically sound way to do this via a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file or some other way?

Don't want to lose my rankings or pagerank and screw up things I have spent money and time on.

Your help is appreciated very much!

Thanks,

Joe

 

By this 301 redirection you will not loose anything. it will raise .ca domain too. better promote it through on canadian sites like dd post on candian based forum,blogs etc and also place some add on the regional based sites.

 

Thanks for the info. Here is what another user said to me on a different forum...

"You could do that but you would risk losing your rankings in google.com if only temporarily. In effect you would need to create a completely new site on the .ca domain and make sure that all the urls on the new site are identical to the urls on the old site and then do re-directs at the url level from the .com site to the .ca site. You would not want to just re-direct at the domain level only."

What do you think? Should I be re-directing every url in my website to the .ca ? I really don't care too much about hurting my google.com rankings. I just want the .ca and Canada based google searches to be where they should.

 

joepipe some here
I have domain.com, (PR4) and I traslate to other domain.x
I used 301 correct

I loss my original PR4 old domain -> 0
My new domain PR0

It`s dangerus .-(((

 

you should need to redirect the back links to new domain

 

I am ..............not know more about redirection

 

This is an excellent advice, I would personally buy the .ca extension and build the similar site for that extension. There is a reason why google.co.uk was built while google.com is for US.