Should I buy a .com or a country domain?

Buy a generic domain — .com, .dev or .co — unless you are certain the business will only ever serve one country. A ccTLD such as .co.uk sends a strong local signal and permanently hard-codes your geo-targeting to that country.

What is a canonical tag for?

A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the preferred version when the same content is reachable at several addresses. It consolidates ranking signals onto the URL you nominate, rather than letting the engine choose for you.

Why is my website not showing on Google?

Work through four causes in order: the site is blocked from crawling, it renders empty without JavaScript, it is indexed but ranks below where anyone looks, or it is too new. Search Console URL Inspection tells you which within a minute.

SEO

How do I move my website without losing rankings?

Build a complete old-URL to new-URL redirect map from a crawl of every page currently returning 200, deploy it as single-hop 301s before anything else changes, and keep it for at least a year. Everything else in a migration is recoverable; a missing map is not.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 173 words 3 sections

Before you touch anything

Crawl the existing site and export every URL returning 200
Export Search Console data for the last 16 months
Record current rankings for your top 20 terms
Export the backlink profile — those pages matter most
Note the current indexed page count

The redirect rules

Map each old URL to the closest equivalent, never en masse to the home page — that is treated as a soft 404
One hop only; chains bleed signal
301 permanent, not 302
Test against the full export, not a sample

The 90 days afterwards

Expect a dip. A well-executed migration usually recovers in four to eight weeks; a poor one does not recover on its own. Watch coverage, 404 logs, your recorded rankings and referring domains weekly.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, Migrating a site without losing what it took years to earn covers it in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.