Is .uk the future?

scottmccloud · Apr 14, 2017

There's absolutely no reason for any large organisation to invest the money in swapping from .co.uk to .uk. What would they actually gain from it?

I find it odd that some people seem desperate for the .uk to be a success. Why? Where's the gain?

jasman · Apr 18, 2017

I agree that there's little point in switching over to .uk at this time. There are many reasons for this - .co.uk is fine as it is, why pay extra to rebrand/ reprint stationery + signs etc, risk of loss of position in search engines... to name but a few. But we said all this during the .uk consultation. Both times. But Nominet don't need to listen to their members any more after they fooled people into accepting the 'new' voting system.

I may be wrong but I imagine that the giant Internet companies would only switch over to .uk if it seemed a consensus was building up amongst UK websites - if large numbers were making the switch each month and it could be predicted that the 50/50 tipping point was pretty much inevitable and would be reached within a couple of years - i.e. like around 2010 when it was clear that mobile traffic would overtake desktop very soon and the Internet giants pushed heavily for publishers to have mobile-friendly sites.

But if there's no consensus forming, why would they give a damn about it? Why would they want to make the switch? It's Nominet (and the registrars) who want people to switch over (and of course they know many will still retain the .co.uk) so it's basically a scam to force people to pay reg fees for twice as many domains, which along with the 50% reg fees price hike will massively increase Nominet's revenue.

Blossom · Apr 18, 2017

dog said:
Why we moved to .uk

https://www.heartinternet.uk/blog/why-we-moved-to-uk/

dee said:
Interesting read.Cheers for that. This seems particularly valid as time moves forward:

It may only be three characters different, but it quickly adds up if you’re a mobile user visiting multiple times a day. Fewer characters mean less chance of typos, and if you have ‘uk’ in your domain name already, it gives you a chance to make it even shorter.

aZooZa said:
I suppose one might surmise that they have a vested interest?

I wrote that blog post, I worked there at the time. There was no hidden agenda. Of course we wanted to sell .uk domains, but it seemed hypocritical to promote them without making the switch ourselves. We also believed that other hosting companies would move to .uk and we wanted to be the first.

The bosses also wanted to have a shorter domain name for the brand. They ended up really disliking typing out long email addresses, which is why they bought a really short domain this time round

markb · Apr 18, 2017

I think most existing websites will and should stick with using their existing .co.uk domains and therefore if I was creating a new site I would use the .co.uk as this is what users expect.

One of the main reasons for this is that many websites will have 301 redirects in place on their sites for various reasons, including many who are moving to https. If these websites where to then redirect to the .uk version it could cause ranking drops due to the large number of redirects. I don't think many websites would want to take this risk when there is no need too.

Admin · Apr 18, 2017

markb said:
I think most existing websites will and should stick with using their existing .co.uk domains and therefore if I was creating a new site I would use the .co.uk as this is what users expect.

One of the main reasons for this is that many websites will have 301 redirects in place on their sites for various reasons, including many who are moving to https. If these websites where to then redirect to the .uk version it could cause ranking drops due to the large number of redirects. I don't think many websites would want to take this risk when there is no need too.

This is just about plausible if you had a redirect chain but you could redirect directly without a chain of redirects to the https://www.yoursite.uk and a couple of redirects from the non https version and from .co.uk isn't going to cause a ranking decline.

martin-s · Apr 18, 2017

A 301 doesn't lose SEO value like it used to anymore?

Admin · Apr 18, 2017

martin-s said:
A 301 doesn't lose SEO value like it used to anymore?

Correct, it changed last year. IMO and experience it never had a significant negative impact anyway.

Ref: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo