I don’t normally write in depth technical information on this blog but I thought now was the perfect opportunity to document a list of changes that have recently been made to the way the ParkatmyHouse website operates.

For the past three years I have been promoting ParkatmyHouse.com rather than just ParkatmyHouse for the simple reason that we didn’t actually own the parkatmyhouse.co.uk domain. Someone had registered it just a month before I thought of the name and I was under the naive impression that I could offer a token amount to acquire the domain in the future.

Unfortunately, without any contact information being available through the normal channels (whois, etc.) and Sedo not being a lot of help, I had no way of making an offer for the domain. I should have approached Nominet to contact the owner on my behalf, however I had no idea that they had a free mediation service.

After three years, I finally got in touch with the owner of the domain and was able to purchase it from him for a fair price without any hassle. Thanks John!

For anyone reading this post that has any kind of SEO knowledge, it is well documented that there are significant benefits to owning the .co.uk domain name if you are targeting the UK population. It is just one of the thousands of variables Google takes in to account when determining search engine positions along with back link quality, page content and anchor text being other key components.

The next few months (or weeks, depending on how quickly Google and the other search engines crawl the website) will shine some light on the SEO benefit of having the correct country specific top level domain extension. Thanks to third party tools at my disposal, I am able to track even the smallest of changes in our search ranking positions. I will post a table of changes in about a month on this blog.

Currently we rank very highly for the majority of our key search terms but there is always room for improvement and we know how important that number one position is. Our parking space owners rely on us to send them drivers on a regular basis and the difference between position 1 and position 3 could double some of our parking space owner’s income.

Apart from putting in all the relevant 301 redirects between the domains in place, checking with Google that there wouldn’t be a duplicate content penalty by having the same content on different domains (www.parkatmyhouse.co.uk/about-us/ and www.parkatmyhouse.com/about-us/), there is still always an element of risk involved.

Google Webmaster Tools has really helped in easing my worries as it allows website owners to target countries by domain or sub-domain. However, as always with SEO techniques, it is a wait and see (and maybe pray) process.

Will we drop in our search engine rankings? Maybe, but if this does happen, I expect them to bounce back quickly and hopefully increase our search rankings over the long term.

So… all that is left is to start asking webmasters and site owners to change our back links to our new structure and making sure that we serve the right domain and content to the appropriate users. Thank goodness for Maxmind and their Geo IP service.

Now.. what to do about our logo… the .com makes part of the wheel.