Hello all,
I run an online retail biz from Canada and we've established a pretty strong branding on our .ca domain name.
Our site offers a great deal of information and media in addition to our online store which is actually divided into 2 independent shopping carts: 1 to serve Canada and 1 to serve the US and the rest of the world.
We're growing fast these days and we now realize that our .ca domain name is limiting our international sales as some people assume that we only serve Canada. So we have acquired a few .com domain names and we are trying to come up with a partial migration strategy.
Many questions remain and so I turn to you for some help
Here is some info on the basics of what we are trying to achieve, and some ideas I pondered, maybe some of you can suggest a way to do all this without loosing our search engine ranking for our existing .ca domain:
- Ideally both .ca and .com would lead to the same site while preserving their domain all through the site. But that's duplicate content for Google and they don't like that...
- Ideally we'd like to achieve as good (or better) search engine placement with our .com domain as with our .ca domain without loosing our spot with the .ca domain. All of our inbound links are coming to our .ca domain, which we are known for. It seems impossible to hope to get as many links to the .com, especially with the same content.
- I thought about turning the US/International shopping cart into a site of it's own at the .com domain but then that domain would not get very good search engine placement since the shopping cart (osCommerce) is based on selling merchandise and not on providing content (the rest of our site does that). It would for the same reasons be hard to do a good SEO on that shopping cart (not a lot of text).
- I then considered migrating the entire site to the .com domain, redirecting our .ca to the .com forever and slowly moving our entire marketing but that seemed to go against sound business practice (too strong branding on the .ca).
- I could add the .com domain as an addon domain but as far as I know Google doesn't like that either...
I think you get the idea. Acquire .com domain and get good ranking for it using old site. Preserve old domain and current ranking. Avoid making Google angry at all costs.
How would you do that ?
How are we supposed to do that without cheating in anyway according to Google (and other major SE) ?
Any sort of insight regarding our situation, possible strategies, etc would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you all.
