Moving to a New Domain

[david64]

Hi, I have had a site for over a year, which is a UK site, but Google has never ranked it on google.co.uk despite ranking on google.com. Changing the geo-locating in Webmaster Tools didn't make any difference. Today I noticed it had popped up at the top of page two of google.co.uk, which is still 6 places below where it ranks on .com.

I have always though about getting the .co.uk equivilant of the domain (which is .com) and then 301ing the .com to it, but never got round to it. Its been a long time since I've redirected an established domain to a new one. How does that go with Google these days? Will it skip the sandbox?

 

[Aspect Investments]

You are offering SEO services in your sig. Assuming that is your site, you should already know this.

 

[mcol]

Is the existing domain hosted in the uk?

 

[FelixSilver]

You mention that the .com "is a UK site".

• Is the site hosted in the UK?
• When was the geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT) done? [I have heard of people seeing results in days and others in months]
• Did you geo-target the whole site, not just sub-domains or folders?

Google determines a site's location using several factors including:

• IP address of web server
• TLD/sub-domain
• GWMT geo-targeting

 

[TheSlackers]

Hi, I have had a site for over a year, which is a UK site, but Google has never ranked it on google.co.uk despite ranking on google.com. Changing the geo-locating in Webmaster Tools didn't make any difference. Today I noticed it had popped up at the top of page two of google.co.uk, which is still 6 places below where it ranks on .com.

I have always though about getting the .co.uk equivilant of the domain (which is .com) and then 301ing the .com to it, but never got round to it. Its been a long time since I've redirected an established domain to a new one. How does that go with Google these days? Will it skip the sandbox?

So in Googles eyes your site is not a UK site? I always think it's strange people getting the .com for UK sites.

loads of info here

 

[david64]

Is the existing domain hosted in the uk?

It was for some time, but it moved down while it was hosted in the UK. Probably just a coincidence.

You mention that the .com "is a UK site".

• Is the site hosted in the UK?
• When was the geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT) done? [I have heard of people seeing results in days and others in months]
• Did you geo-target the whole site, not just sub-domains or folders?

Google determines a site's location using several factors including:

• IP address of web server
• TLD/sub-domain
• GWMT geo-targeting

Site was hosted in the UK, but now in the US. Being hosted in the UK for several months made no difference.

Domain is a .com.

Geo-targeting was done over a year ago in GWT. It took about 3 months for the site to come up in Google for "pages from the UK". It spent most of its time on pages 6-9 on google.co.uk while being pos. 3-5 on google.com. For a number of months it has not come up anywhere on google.co.uk, but recently it popped up on page two and has found its way to the top.

So in Googles eyes your site is not a UK site? I always think it's strange people getting the .com for UK sites.

The site was just an experiment. I wanted to rent the site out for a quite competitive term as I know another company is doing the same for a handsome monthly fee. Since it only ranked in the US and the term isn't used in the US, I just forgot about it until I saw it had popped up out of the blue. I got the .com as it was just an experiment.

____

The geo-targetting is not the issue here. I tried other things like adding UK idents on like post codes, phone numbers etc. and it made no difference.

The purpose of this thread is to find out if anyone here has 301ed an established domain (that isn't penalised) into a brand new one? I did this once about 3 years ago and the new domain was sandboxed for a while. However over the past two months I have seen two sites do this (mattcutt.com and an SEO comapny) and they had no issues.

You are offering SEO services in your sig. Assuming that is your site, you should already know this.

I am simply looking to see if anyone here has had any issues with this. I know what should happen, but you don't always get what you expect with Google.

 

[natashacs]

Hi - I have done this.
Basically, for my keywords, my site which was originally a .com site was ranking really high in the .com search engine but not at all in the .co.uk
I got the .co.uk domain name, had a 501 redirect put on, and nothing happened at all. I know Page rank apparenlty counts for nothing these days, but my previous page rank was 2.

Anyway, for a few weeks nothing happened, then gradually google started picking up on the .co.uk site. It is now on page 1 of google for nearly all my main keywords, or at the top of page 2. It's page rank is now 4. My posiiton is still number 2 in the.com search engine.

So - that is what happened.