I acquired an online B2B business about a year ago. The original owners created the website with a .co extension and made patchwork updates over the years. I subsequently purchased the .com domain and have it redirected to the .co domain. Fortunately, most of our business is generated through referrals and paid ads, but I'd like to improve our SEO. Based on an audit, I found that we have some pretty big hurdles to overcome such as an 8-second load time, 400+ pages (mostly redirects from their original website with poorly performing content), and a very low domain authority. My question is whether I should build a new website on the .com domain that I currently have redirected to the .co domain (and reverse the redirect). Is it worth it to give up the age, limited domain authority and organic traffic (albeit very low) of the .co site to have a faster, more user-friendly .com site?
A ".com" is a much better long term solution because Google and people generally recognize that as more authoritative/ trustworthy. The best way to change a ".co" over to a ".com", is by creating a "301 redirect" for EACH PAGE and keep everything else the exact same until Google indexes the new version. Also, you might want to contact any important inbound links and ask them to update their link to be to the new address. And you can register both domains inside Google Search Console and submit a "change of address".
Does this help?
Answered 4 years ago
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