Nutstretch

I have been to a seo seminar and have been advised to use the .com version of my domain name instead of the .co.uk as you can register for longer and apparently that gives favour in googles eyes. At present I have my .co.uk hosted on these servers and .com is pointing to it.

So as not to lose the PR that i have at present I have beem advised to make the .com the main domain and point the .co.uk to it using a perment redirect in the htaccess file.

I just would like to get the proceedure right first before i mess everything up

I am thinking my steps should be

1. get hosting on these servers for.com
2. upload the website to the new hosting
3. create htaccess file to say premenant redirect.
upload htaccess file.

Is this what i would need to put into my htaccess file

If this is correct. where do I post the htaccess file on the .co.uk hosting if i still have it or on the .com hosting.

Do i need to just do domain name or all pages below it?

Any help on this would be appreciated.


Angie
(Nutstretch)

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knapper

Humm, not sure about this. I would be surprised if there was any truth to this, and certainly if there was actually any good evidence to prove it. You say you were advised, by who? and what firm evidence did they provide? I just had a quick check on google and did a couple of searches and checked the whois information for the top results and didn't find a single site with more than a year or two on their names. Google hasn't bothered with their domain name. If the only reason your changing to the .com is because of this I would reconsider, its not a very good reason.

Sounds dodgy, very dodgy.

Samizdata

Hope you didn't have to pay for it.

Sure, you can register a .com for ten years, but Google doesn't really care.

I have UK domains that do very nicely on both google.com and ALL its regional sites.

If you change this arrangement you can expect rankings to drop temporarily (possibly for months), and when it is all over you probably won't see any improvement - and if you are targetting UK visitors you will need to set the geolocation back to UK in Google Webmaster Tools anyway.

If you have a ranking problem there may well be other causes.

First you would want to direct the domain to your UH nameservers, then alias it from Ensim.

Then you would put this in an .htaccess in your public folder:

Personally I wouldn't take any notice of SEO "experts" - they often approach my clients offering to put their sites at the top of the Google rankings for a considerable fee, without noticing that they are already there and did it for nothing.

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knapper

Did another 5 minutes checking, not one.

Dodgy, very dodgy

Paul_F

If you have lots of inbound links to your .co.uk site then you are likely to lose the 'Pagerank' benefit of those. I'd leave it be.

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Paul
Website design Kent
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TygerTyger

I people are being a touch hard on your here. The primary reason for this idea is this bit of text, which was included in a Google Patent.

You can find the same perspective reflected from this man who worked for Yahoo, and various other sources.

The idea is out there and is at least acknowledged, if not actually understood. I suspect that Google's interest is also on no greater scale than a "flag" and not a direct "register for longer and your website will do better" relationship. Nobody knows what effect, if any, registration length has but the logic that reputable sites are expecting to be around for longer is solid. Spammers are not in the business of long-term or paying out any more than they have to, indeed their business relies on paying very little.

I should disclaim that I don't sell SEO advice - at least, not unless it is by special request - but in my inexpert opinion I wouldn't go out of your way to kowtow to this factor. If renewal day rolls around again and you are sure you won't be changing your domain, it doesn't cost you to register for longer so if you're happy to do so then why not?

Just because a site is doing well already, it doesn't mean that it couldn't be doing better or that other factors are irrelevant or will have no effect. It's quite easy to see this by the number of websites that rank highly in Google yet are missing some of even the most obvious SEO advantages.

BBC News, for instance, ranks top in Google for the search "News" yet they ignore the standard advice of putting the site name last in the page title. They use invalid HTML. They have poor URL structure as far as SEO goes. No doubt there are plenty more areas they fall down in. Does that mean just because they are doing nicely that other factors won't allow them to do even nicer? 'Course not.

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Samizdata

The logic that Google is aware of UK domains being two-year only is solider.

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knapper

Good links TygerTyger, however this seems to be put in place to stop short time domain registration for spam. I presume the first thing checked would be the domains history, then, if it's a new registration, look at when its been registered to. Effectively it seems to be a tool to check newly registered rather than established domains.

Looking at when Nutstretch registered on these forums, I pressume the domain has been established for a while, therefore has a history. If it is an established domain it was very, very poor advice to give. Seems to be a case of a little knowledge.....

(If it isn't an established domain a little slice of pie is at the ready )

edit:
Actually for an established domain it's not just very poor, it's just plain wrong and even if it's a new domain it's still very bad advice. Even if there is an effect, all you need to do is register it for more than the minimum. Definitily a case of a little knowledge.....

pursuit

if this bears anything on SEO then that's absolutely a laughable thing say the least wherever it comes from. it doesnt cost a fortune to register a domain for 10, 20, 50, 100 years (if that's possible or allowed)as compared to money spent on Adword or PPC. I would expect the pair who invented google would be much mcuh more clever unless those the pair subsequently hires are in fact no more than some US high school leavers and actually come up with this ideas without the acknowledgement of the original pair.

Shall we sue Nominet's stupidity for limiting UK domain name registration to only two years then? I am calling my lawyer now...

percepts

What you do is get the SEO company to sign a contract with you stating that they have proof of exactly how Google does its positioning. When they refuse, you can assume that they don't know. And if they don't know, what are you paying for?
The answer is the all the myth and b******t that flies around the web about SEO.
If they really knew then it would be far simpler for them to write web sites that made them a lot more money than running SEO seminars will ever do.

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Nutstretch

Thanks to all of you for a fantastic contribution. The advice came from a Business Link SEO workshop which was free. So I am even more confused now....

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If at first you don't succeed, drink the rest of the bottle and loop to the same place tomorrow.

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TygerTyger

Well, I think the unanimous advice was to stick with what you have. As Samizdata pointed out and I totally forgot to say, .co.uks have limited registration time options anyway so you can't possibly be penalised for it. And if you want to do it with the .com, don't go out of your way to do so.

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Paul_F

As someone who is paid to advise on SEO (I'll admit it ) I would definitely advise leaving as is. Any possible benefit from registering .com for 10 years is negated by clouding the status of your inbound links (do you know how many you have? try the yahoo site explorer Yahoo! Site Explorer or get a google webmasters account https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/).

You will 'probably' lose some google relevance for UK searches (there's another rumour - that .uk domains get a boost for UK searches).

Also, ignoring Google, a .uk domain makes UK folks feel like they are dealing with a UK company which can be a general benefit.

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Paul
Website design Kent
english coast - seo kent

pursuit

well, there is nothing wrong with that if you really know what you are ta;lking about and hand on heart believe a site does benefit from doing some SEO goodies, not just because one presents he himself/herself as an SEO 'expert' and therefore MUST say something even if it is complete rubbish. I have heard 'advice' that says 'dont use html tags' as SEs cant read these (because he used a keyword tool that came up with words such as 'font', 'table' as kws at top of the list), and also heard about a 'company' that used to sell phone cards but then overnight became a 'google accredited SEO expert'.

and please keep this in mind: always show your mercy towards the ordinary site owners who are nothing more than plain business people and know little other than doing business. and dont turn your SEO business into something that reminds people of the lotto lady (remember the early days of the lotto?) looking into her crystal ball and predicting when and where you were going to win the lotto

Tim

Just a note about Business Link. We used to run seminars for them about setting up web sites and e-commerce for small businesses. We had to jump through a few hoops to get the gig, but it was essentially a case of us saying we were experts rather than them having any proof of that. My point being that Business Link use a wide range of people to deliver things and some will be better than others.

And I've nothing against Business Link at all - on the contrary, I'd always recommend businesses get their free advice. But take the advice with a pinch of salt and try to have it backed up from other sources.

Samizdata

SEO (search engine optimisation) is a term that was probably invented by an estate agent.

In general it refers to things that any website creator should have learned in lesson 1 of their education - title, description, keywords, semantic markup (H1 tags etc), hyperlinking (never to the index file by name), ALT tags for images, attracting relevant inbound links.

If you make websites and don't already do this you are playing the wrong game.

Advanced techniques are more to do with server configuration than website creation - using 301s for moved content (though "cool URLs don't change" is a useful mantra), addressing potential duplication and canonical issues, controlling vermin and proxy servers that can adversely affect your rankings.

Most will do this in .htaccess but those on a dedicated server can configure it themselves.

The "SEO industry" has sprung up because so many sites are poorly made, but in my experience most of the practitioners are chancers or snake-oil salespersons - they might get you a good ranking for as long as it takes for your cheque to clear, but the techniques they use will always be penalised by the search engines eventually.

The good news is that everything you need to know can be found in a community such as this, where a high calibre of peer review usually ensures that the advice is sound - and completely free.

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geebee

i've heard of most of the things you mention but not this...

why's that then?

Samizdata

In any directory, the URL "index.html" is different to "/" and if a search engine finds the same content at both addresses it will divide the ranking between them - a duplicate content issue.

So, for example, when linking back to your site root (index page) you should not specify a filename, and I would always redirect any inbound links of that sort in my .htaccess configuration.

Here endeth the seminar.

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vord

Back to the point. Where is your market? If your market is the UK then hosting on a UK server with a .co.uk domain name is unbeatable. Don't change it ever. The domain licencing duration is not a factor (as the guys have said).

For both a worldwide market and a UK market you'll wish you started off with the .com fair enough. Makes progress faster. But changing domain names now has it's (big) issues.

PS - Samizdata agree 100%. Long time since I've heard anyone talk that way on the subject. You forgot the redirect from non-www to www. which gets rid of some more variations on the index page.

Black art this stuff.

Samizdata

I did specifically mention "canonical issues" - but peer review is always welcome.

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