Nominet has this week announced the rollout of a new .uk domain extension as an alternative to the existing .co.uk extension which will become available from Summer 2014.
First refusal will be giving to existing owners of the .co.uk domain for a period of 5 years and should a user own the .org.uk equivalent, priority will be given to the owner of the .co.uk domain.
Will it affect my SEO if I move my website on a .co.uk domain to a .uk domain?
The simple answer is: no, it shouldn’t. Provided you (or your SEO) agency ensures all pages on your site and domain are redirected properly to your new domain the you shouldn’t see any lasting ill effects. IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not just redirect pages of your existing .co.uk site to the new domains home page – they must 301 redirect to the actual pages on the new .uk domain.
Even if you plan to keep your .co.uk domain you should certainly snap up the .uk equivalents for your brand-name and existing website URLs.
Whether or not the new domain will cause confusion amongst website visitors is yet to be seen but by introducing the .uk domain, Nominet will bring the UK into line with other countries with similar domain names such as France (.fr), Spain (.es) and Germany (.de).
