4 replies to this topic

[seobarry]

Hi all,

I have a .nl site which I want to change to .com This means that mydomain.nl will become mydomain.com
Since I have lots of incoming links to my .nl site and since it is well ranked in google I want to be sure to keep my rankings. I have heared that I can redirect my .nl site to my new .com domain permanently by moving all the site content from the .nl to the .com domain and then do a permanent redirect from my .nl to my .com domain through a .htaccess file

Will this strategy make sure that my rankings remain unharmed? Are there people in here who have tested this and can confirm to me that it works? And what specifc redirect should I use if I want all the inner pages of my .nl domain to refer to the correct inner page on my .com domain?

This is what I found on the internet, will this to the trick? I'm not sure what the first line if for...

CODE

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Finally, I also want to change the structue of the site. However, I was wondering if it hurts if an inner page first gets redirected from .nl to .com and then when arriving at .com gets rewrited by the .htaccess on the .com domain to still a differnt url (within the same domain). An example:

mydomain.nl/myinnerpage.html gets redirected by the permanent redirect to mydomain.com/myinnerpage.html

and then the .htaccess file for the .com domain rewrites:
mydomain.com/myinnerpage.html to mydomain.com/myinnerpage/

I hope I did not ask to many questions, any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Randy]

Welcome seobarry !

I fear there are going to be more questions than answers in my reply, but I want to make sure we understand the whole story.

First, is the majority of your site traffic coming from .nl searchers? Is this what you're trying to maintain or are more of your visitors/traffic coming from a worldwide audience. The reason I ask is that ccTLD's such as .nl help those sites rank better in the region specific searches, where the competition is usually a bit less.

We have a whole thread up in the International section of the forum under the Resources and Advice heading you may want to delve into. The answer, or at least part of the answer, is going to depend upon what you have now and what you're shooting for.

Second, are you going to maintain the hosting for the .nl domain? If so, yes you'll want to do the redirection from there and the example you provided would do the trick. On the other hand, if you were going to park or alias one domain on top of the other you could perform all of the redirection from the .com if that's what you wanted to do. You could use either a positive or negative match RewriteCond statement to detect the domains.

Third, is the new .com a totally new, not-previously-used domain? Or did someone have it before you by chance? You can check this in the wayback machine.

On to your questions...

A 301 or Permanent Redirect is what you're going to end up with. It's the one that will allow link popularity/pagerank to pass from one page to another. Anything else will end up breaking the chain.

That said, there is no guarantee that rankings won't be harmed. They probably will be for at least a little while. If you're lucky and everything is done perfectly the shortest time frame I've seen is 4-6 weeks. Typically though the full effect of a mass 301 like this from one site to another can take 6 months or more to settle in. If the .com is brand new Google is still applying their Aging Delay it could be longer. Some have said they're not doing that for 301'd domains anymore, but I've personally not seen any proof of it except in cases where the original domain had a ton of authority.

As to the double redirect question, two redirects like you mention shouldn't be a problem as long as both of them deliver 301 responses. You don't want to go too much farther with it though. That's when you start seeing a dropoff pretty quickly.

[seobarry]

Thank you for your extensive reply!

The majority of my traffic indeed comes from .nl searchers. And yes, I do want to maintain this in the future, I don't want to harm the number of incoming .nl searchers.

I do plan on maintaining the hosting for the .nl domain and do the redirection from there. I thought this was the best way to do it. But now you suggest that I can also "park or alias one domain on top of the other you could perform all of the redirection from the .com" I didn't know this was possible at all. But I understand from your answer that maintaining my .nl domain hosting and redirecting from there would be more preferrable in terms of SEO anyway. Is that correct?

The .com domain is quite new, I registered it 01-feb-2008

What I understand from you is that what I want is possible but it's quite unsure to what extend my rankings will be harmed and how long the negative effect wil last? Especially because I go from .nl to .com and I want to retain my .nl searchers?

Thanks again!

Edited by projectphp, 05 May 2008 - 04:05 AM.
No need for quote!

[Randy]

To maintain your .nl searchers you're going to be best served by keeping the .nl as your primary address. The idea being that the ccTLD is one of the main things the search engines look at when determining the geo location of a given site. See this pinned thread for more details on this subject.

If it were my decision I'd definitely keep the .nl. available.

If the .nl content is in Dutch and not in English, then you could set up the .com as the English/Worldwide version after translating the content. You could even link between the two sites to provide users (and spiders) two language versions of the site, with the English version residing on the .com domain.

If the .nl is already in English I'd probably simply point the .com to the .nl via a 301. There are several ways to do this, depending upon if you Park or Alias it to the .nl location, or get separate hosting space for the .com.

[seobarry]

thanks again for the reply (I was away for a few days so slow reply from my side). I think I know what to do now, great!