Should you move at all?
A .ae domain tells people in the UAE that you're a local business, and some customers do trust it more. But Google already uses other signals to work out where you operate, such as your address, your Google Business Profile and the language of your pages. If your .com ranks well and you serve several countries, staying put is often the better call.
Moving makes sense when you're focused on the UAE, your brand is strongly local, or you're splitting one global site into country sites.
Before the move
- Crawl the whole .com site and save a list of every URL that gets traffic or has links pointing at it.
- Export your top pages and queries from Search Console so you have a baseline to compare against.
- Register the .ae domain through an accredited registrar. You'll need a UAE trade licence or trademark.
- Build the new site on a staging server and check it matches the old one page for page.
On the day
Every old URL should redirect to its exact new equivalent with a 301. Not to the homepage, and not through a chain of two or three redirects. This is where most migrations go wrong. A product page that redirects to a category page loses most of what it had built up.
Then add the .ae site to Search Console, submit the new sitemap and use the Change of Address tool in the old property. Update your Google Business Profile, social profiles and any directory listings you control.
The first three months
Expect some wobble. On the 11 migrations we've run since 2023, traffic dipped between 5% and 20% for two to six weeks before recovering. The two that took longest both had redirect mistakes we found in the first week of monitoring.
Check the indexing report in Search Console every few days. Look for old URLs that are still indexed, new URLs marked as duplicates, and 404 errors. Keep the redirects in place for at least a year, and ideally for good.
Ask the sites that link to you
Redirects pass most of the value, but a direct link is better. Make a list of your best links and ask those sites to update the address. Partners and suppliers usually say yes.
- Technical SEO
- Site migration
- UAE
Omar Saleh
Omar leads technical SEO at AdAscend. He has run more domain migrations than he'd like to count and still checks redirects by hand.
