Risk losing UK traffic to a high ranking .com?

Hi,

I've searched the archived forums before posting this, but can't find an exact match.

We have a UK based site that has a .com address and it is performing very well with traffic to the site growing at a healthy rate. We also have a .co.uk version of our site which is 301'd to the .com address.

We get equal numbers of visitors from Google.com as we do G.co.uk, however the visitor bias is definitely from the UK judging by our hourly traffic stats (traffic overnight drops to about 1/5th of that in daytime)

We now want to launch a US version of the site.

My question is - should we try and introduce the .co.uk domain as the UK version of the site, and change the emphasis of the .com site to attract visitors from the US?

This would appear to fit in better with the way Google would expect the site to work, but I fear losing all the great search positions that we currently get on the .com site from the UK.

The alternative is to forget the .co.uk and instead do something like

website.us.com OR
us.website.com

this would potentially make launching into new coutries much easier, as we don;t have to worry about buying country-specific URLs everytime we expand. However, will Google recogise that, for the example above, we are targeting the US market as well as it might do, if had the correct country domain i.e. a .com?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated - the primary concern is to not lose the traffic that we have worked so hard to generate in the UK.

Cheers

Chris

"..should we try and introduce the .co.uk domain as the UK version of the site, and change the emphasis of the .com site to attract visitors from the US?"

G is increasingly "regionalising" results, to properly target the States the .com would need to be hosted there, have US-centric content, and a majority of links coming from US sites.

Instead of one, but if your SERPS appear in two diff regions, It shud prove beneficial all the way..

More pages, More listings, more diff KW's and More diff SERPS for two diff URL's

Ofcourse the more you spread, the more you are bound to gather..

Get backlinks from US based relevant websites..and from those sites which are hosted in US, if your site is hosted in US its ok, even if its not, no worries, US Serps are global

Regards
LKS

Thanks glengara

Just to be clear, (as there is a fair bit of work and expense involved in re-locating the site to be hosted in the US) G will give us far better US SERPS if we go for the .com option, properly set up as you described vs going for the simpler option of website.us.com even with US centric content and US inbound links?

"website.us.com"

You know that's a subdomain of us.com, did you mean website.com/us or us.website.com?

Either way, if you're serious about the US I'd use a dedicated site rather than subdomains/directories....

Guys, thanks for the input so far - I think we'll definitely go for the separate .com and .co.uk sites. To quote Columbo, "Just one more question"

Having put more thought into this I have just one final (major) concern about how we avoid loising the traffic we currently receive.

At present the .com site (with the .co.uk 301 redirected to it) gets several thousand visitors per day mainly from the UK.

I need to switch the emphasis of the .com site so that it attracts US and non-Uk traffic - in the meantime get the .co.uk site to attract visitors from the UK.

As I see it, there are 2 ways to do this:

1. Switch the 301 re-direct so that the .com actually points to the .co.uk site. Once the .co.uk site is up to speed and indexed by Google, remove the 301 and change the emphasis of the .com site to meet the needs of the US audience.

2. Take the 301's off completely and let Google spider both sites. Eventually Google will only display the .co.uk pages to UK audience and .com pages to the US audience. I've checked Google's Duplicate Content policy and as long as you have TLDs that are obviously targeting different audiences (which .com and .co.uk do) and the content is product related (which it is) then it will not treat the duplicate site as malicious.

My question is, which of these options will pass the existing traffic that we get from the UK to the .com site and migrate it the .co.uk site without killing our visitor numbers?

Cheers, Chris

Can anyone help with this? I'm just concerned that one false move, and I'll lose traffic that has taken months to build up.

Any help greatly appreciated

Cheers, Chris

It all depends on your backlinks. If they are all directed to the .com, yet are uk specific you would have to ask those who link to you to change otherwise when you eventually end the 301 to the .co.uk from the .com site the .co.uk will loose their value and its ranking will fall.

If it were me I would do the following:

Redirect the .com to the .co.uk, as in your first option, at the same time start a .net site (if available or .us or .biz) build a completely new site, hosting it on a US server, and target this at your American audience, building up links specific to the location and audience. I would then also place a link (or feature) on the original site directing american traffic to it.