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I didn't want to be too cheeky.

I agree with Vadim - as much as we go on and on about a perfect NAP in local, I think in this case, it should be just fine.

Unless you want to keep it that way in the hopes that someone will notice, tweet about it, and drive a ton of amusing social traffic to your client's site.

From the mouth of Google: "setting a geographic target won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country". So if your users in the UK say "return UK sites only" then you likely wouldn't be shown unless you change your behaviour. And that depends on how users in your target country search, which I don't know enough about for the UK.

Then perhaps it's your hosting location but likely also the geographic location of any inbound links. Do you happen to have a lot of links from French sources?

What did you set as the geographic target in Google Webmaster Tools?

I'd disagree that it's fully on or fully off based on my experience, but I'm sure that it's different depending on country, ability for Google to judge location/intent etc.

In my experience, the area covered by the result map depends entirely on the results that Google feels are relevant. Here, I've seen a map far wider than the size of the city for a specific search because there's a major competitor outside the city limits.

Try searching for things that are a bit more industrial and therefore outside the city limits (usually) and see how it varies from the more neighbourhood-specific searches like coffee shop.

Have you read SEOmoz's excellent guide to redirects? If not, look that over.

In my experience, it doesn't destroy traffic to move from a .somethingelse to a .somethingnew. I've moved from .ca to .com, vice versa, .net to .com etc.

Things to consider:

• Have a crawl of the site (crawl test is great for this, plus I use Screaming Frog to cross-reference)
• Double-check that all the URLs are redirected and working (you can use a test server for this)
• Check analytics (use the last year of data) and look at all the URLs that received even one visit, and make sure they're reflected in the data from the previous two points.
• Sign up both URLs in Webmaster Tools and indicate the change there when it happens. I'd recommend parking the new .com domain on the old .net domain for a bit, registering it in Webmaster Tools first, and then having the switch happen.

Let me know if that helps.

Thanks for sharing this! Fantastic idea.

Great thread, Rand!

One of my favourites - Using delayed remarketing, e.g. for oil changes. Set the remarketing cookie on the thank you page when someone signs up for the oil change service, and then hold the remarketing for 90 days to remind them to come in again.

Great thread, Rand!

One of my favourites - Using delayed remarketing, e.g. for oil changes. Set the remarketing cookie on the thank you page when someone signs up for the oil change service, and then hold the remarketing for 90 days to remind them to come in again.

I agree with Vadim - as much as we go on and on about a perfect NAP in local, I think in this case, it should be just fine.

Unless you want to keep it that way in the hopes that someone will notice, tweet about it, and drive a ton of amusing social traffic to your client's site.

I didn't want to be too cheeky.

Canonical tags won't fix issues with incorrect a hrefs. I'd recommend using a tool such as Screaming Frog to crawl your site and find the source of the links with the extra > at the end, then correcting them manually.

The crawl test might find these (I'm not sure!) but Screaming Frog definitely will. It's my go to tool to find pages that are linked incorrectly.

To add to William's great points, if you're only optimizing for the country because you want to sell the shirts there, you'll have to do more to rank. I'd recommend blogging about football in those countries, setting up country-specific landing pages with the shirts from those countries, and add pages about shipping to those countries and how much it usually costs. I hope that helps!

Then perhaps it's your hosting location but likely also the geographic location of any inbound links. Do you happen to have a lot of links from French sources?

I just checked your site in OSE and I see a domain authority of 28. Where did you see the 1?

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.mmaplanet.nl

Have you read SEOmoz's excellent guide to redirects? If not, look that over.

In my experience, it doesn't destroy traffic to move from a .somethingelse to a .somethingnew. I've moved from .ca to .com, vice versa, .net to .com etc.

Things to consider:

• Have a crawl of the site (crawl test is great for this, plus I use Screaming Frog to cross-reference)
• Double-check that all the URLs are redirected and working (you can use a test server for this)
• Check analytics (use the last year of data) and look at all the URLs that received even one visit, and make sure they're reflected in the data from the previous two points.
• Sign up both URLs in Webmaster Tools and indicate the change there when it happens. I'd recommend parking the new .com domain on the old .net domain for a bit, registering it in Webmaster Tools first, and then having the switch happen.

Let me know if that helps.

From the mouth of Google: "setting a geographic target won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country". So if your users in the UK say "return UK sites only" then you likely wouldn't be shown unless you change your behaviour. And that depends on how users in your target country search, which I don't know enough about for the UK.