I am experimenting with Addon domains. I understand that to help with SEO and google rankings, if one was changing from say a domain.com to a domain.com.au, one sets up a htaccess 301 redirect (where domain.com.au is to become the new primary domain with a new website on it). I am doing just that, building a new client website and changing it to a .com.au instead of .com. We do not want to loose any rankings that this business already has...however, its old website was a Wix DIY and is not doing so well in rankings. So, with that in mind the new website has been built using wordpress. The old domain.com (the wix website) we are throwing out and moving everything to a new hosting service on a VPS i control. In being sensitive to SEO and rankings, I was considering; setting up two copies of the website (ie domain.com and domain.com.au) and hosting them on separate accounts, OR Setup the new website on domain.com.au and create an addon for domain.com with redirects using htaccess. (This is my preferred option as it saves money on hosting costs) The thought occurred to me that if i use an Addon domain for the old "domain.com" and i set its home directory to domain.com.au/public_html (where the new Wordpress website for domain.com.au resides) is that good enough for SEO rankings? Essentially, if i now type in domain.com, it obviously loads domain.com.au. Is that going to work, or does google penalize a change from .com to .com.au even though the "domain name" is the same? I mean let us face it, when people go searching for a website name, they are not searching by .com or .com.au or .org to begin with...we tend to read left to right...so after the https://, the first thing we as readers are interested in is the "name". If the google algorithm is intuitive in that it tries to think like a user, wouldn't the ranking for the old domain still remain so long as the "name" stays the same? What negatives and other issues can i expect from doing this?
