NFON merged its country domains into one gTLD, and Austria grew

This is a write-up of a case documented by Eoghan Henn at searchviu, who says NFON was his client at the time and that he had access to their numbers. We have not seen NFON’s analytics ourselves, so every figure below is the author’s, and both are percentages: the source gives no absolute traffic counts.

Why would a company merge its country domains?#

Henn’s core argument is that pages on the same domain share ranking signals more easily than pages on different domains, so links earned by one market help the others. He adds practical reasons: one website is simpler and cheaper to manage than several, and a weak country site can borrow strength from a stronger one. Google’s own guide to multi-regional sites frames the trade-off from the other side: a ccTLD gives a strong, clear geotargeting signal, while subdirectories on a gTLD are easy to set up and low maintenance but less obvious to users.

What NFON changed#

NFON is a cloud telephone system provider operating in 12 countries. Its Austrian domain, nfon.at, had been online since 2010 before it was merged into the international gTLD in early 2015, becoming nfon.com/at/. The German site moved from nfon.net to nfon.com/de/ at the end of 2013 or early 2014, and the UK site moved from nconnect.com to nfon.com/gb/.

What the source reports#

For Austria, the article states that organic traffic grew 90% in the first five months after the migration compared with the previous year, and that leads generated through organic search grew 100% in the same time frame, year over year. Henn notes the migration came with a redesign, so the domain switch cannot take all the credit.

Germany started differently. The old German domain had a manual penalty for unnatural link building and a recovery of more than half a year in 2013 and 2014. After the switch, NFON lost most of its German visibility directly, which the author attributes to redirect chains. For the three years after the migration, he reports stable organic traffic growth in Germany for the first time.

The UK section gives no percentage figures, but it is the closest thing to a reversal test. A redesign weeks before the move had no noticeable effect; the boost came after the switch to nfon.com/gb/. In May 2017 the UK team moved to nfon.co.uk, which, in Henn’s words, did not have the power to maintain the rankings and was even outranked by the English version on nfon.com. After moving back to nfon.com/gb/, he says NFON was stronger than ever in the UK.

What does the author say can go wrong?#

Henn is explicit that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. His warnings:

• Merging one strong domain with several weak ones often fails; NFON’s country domains already had history and decent link profiles.
• A brand new gTLD ranks less easily than an established one, and short-term losses are almost always part of a migration.
• Merged versions share negative signals too, such as harmful links or thin content, and their performance becomes closely connected.
• Different brands per country, local user preference for a ccTLD, or market-specific rules can rule the move out. He calls a mixed setup a viable option.

What should you check before a merge?#

The Germany dip is the practical lesson. Henn’s advice is to redirect every old URL directly to its new target, keep the old domains and their SSL certificates, update the links you control, and connect the country versions with correct hreflang. Google’s site move guide says the same about chains, advising a redirect to the final destination directly, and to keep redirects generally for at least a year. Before launch, run your redirect map through the redirect chain analyzer and generate the annotations with the hreflang tag generator. Henn also recommended setting a country per directory in Search Console; Google’s current multi-regional guide no longer mentions that setting.

How to read it#

The author says several factors were at play, including content focus and a solid technical foundation, and that he believes the international domain strategy was one of the most important drivers. That is his judgment, not a controlled test. A single client, one migration and year-over-year comparisons cannot separate the domain move from everything else changing at the time. Treat it as a documented outcome, and note the Germany dip as the cost of a poorly executed redirect plan.