Redirecting users based on location
-
My site is available in EN, DE, SW, SP, FR, IT, CH and JP.
However, the EN sites ranks much better than the other languages, and even when searching in another language the EN homepage is normally the result that appears.
Would it be worthwhile to automatically redirect users to the site in the same language they are searching in or country they are searching from? If so, how do I go about this?
Thanks!
-
Thanks for your response!
May I ask how you achieved this? I have a client that wants to show different content based on US State Location.Thanks
-
Hi Sara,
The GEO-IP redirect isn't an approach I favour.
As Google normally crawl from a US IP it can cause indexation problems.
As such I prefer something like cheapflights.com implement - if you visit cheapflights.com from a UK IP you are pushed to this international choice page - http://www.cheapflights.com/workers/profile-select.aspx?sref=CFUK&redirect=GeoIP&geoip=GB&cfref=CFUS&spt=Home&rp=/
This allows user to select the appropriate site (nicer for users) and allows both versions to be crawled.
My recommendation would be to implement something like that rather than a hard redirect to a specific language version.
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
I haven't redirected users by country, but I am doing it by US state for certain services on a site.
-
When a user visits the page from a state we offer the service in, they are 302 redirected to the state specific page
-
When a crawler visits the page, they are NOT redirected anywhere
-
On that same page, we have links pointing to the state specific page so they can be discovered by the crawler
-
-
Hi SaraSEO,
I don't think redirecting visitors based upon country is wise because of the following reasons:
- The Search Engine crawlers are not neccissarily located in the country they crawl for and might not be able to crawl all languages.
- Redirecting Users but not Crawlers could be considerd cloaking
- There might be German speaking people in sweden getting very annoyed not being able to see the german version. - Google explicitly advises not to do this:
"Make sure each language version is easily discoverable
Keep the content for each language on separate URLs. Don’t use cookies to show translated versions of the page. Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click.
Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site."
source: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192&topic=2370587&ctx=topic
Greets,
Sven
-
I think the only option would be to either have separate sites / urls or - redirect user to the relevant version of the site when they first land on your site, by checking their geo location. Now, if you're using one site and redirect, then I'm presuming you're still using the same urls - it's just the content that changes accordingly based on the location.
It looks like international versions of Google services are hosted in specific countries as their IP address changes - try for instance google.ru, google.pl etc. and you'll see using the SEOMoz toolbar that the IP is different, but I'm not quite sure if crawlers are only coming from the main server or not. Perhaps someone else could answer this.
You can do redirection using two methods : Javascript or Server side technology. Depending on what server technology you're using there are several classes / scripts available out there. Here's an example of one for PHP : http://www.geoplugin.com/webservices/php
The HTML5 has a built in Geolocation API, which you can read more and see some examples of here : http://merged.ca/iphone/html5-geolocation
With HTML5 Geolocation you will always be first asked if you want to allow the site to use your location - this is something you cannot get rid of.
I hope this helps a bit.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I am based in the UK. I want to appeal to a UK and US market. One of my keywords is 'generalised' which gets way more traffic in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do?
Hi folks. I am based in the UK. I am about to launch a new blog, and I want to appeal to the UK and US markets. One of my primary keywords is 'generalised', which gets way more traffic (as seen using Moz's keyword tool) in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do? Any guidance would be great. I note this has been discussed before, but seemingly without a conclusion. I would really appreciate any help you can provide.
International SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
301 redirect .com to .nl
Hi guys, We have two job websites: one international job website (.com, PR5) and one Dutch job website (.nl, PR0). We have decided to focus on our Dutch job website and want to 301 redirect the international website to the Dutch website. Will this give us the boost we are hoping for on the Dutch site? Or does a .com redirect to .nl work different than a .nl to .nl redirect for example. We're hoping that the international juice will boost our Dutch website of course. Looking forward to your thoughts!
International SEO | | rodjer0 -
CcTLDs 301 redirected to subfolders
My client has an international website and currently has a mixture of ccTLDs, subdomains, and subfolders for the country specific pages. We are trying to change this however they want to have ccTLDS because of the SEO benefit but 301 redirect them to subfolders because of the simplicity of management that subfolders provide. I believe that if they are really just working with subfolders, why don't they just use subfolders and use Google Webmaster Tools and XML Sitemaps to help Google understand each targeted country. My questions are: 1. Does having aht ccTLD example.ca 301 redirected to example.com/ca really benefit anything? 2. This client tends to spell out the name of the country even with country specific TLDs, and they can't change it, will this affect SEO? Ex: example.ca/canada. 3. What the best practice? example.ca/canada/en-ca/city or example.ca/canada/city/en-ca? Thanks!
International SEO | | nrv0 -
Does the location of my Domain Registrar affect SEO?
Does the location of my Domain Registrar affect SEO? For example, if my hosting company is in the U.S., but the domain registrar is overseas. Also, is it better to have both services be met by one company?
International SEO | | greenfoxone0 -
Sudden drop in rankings after 301 redirect
We recently merged our old webshops to one big webshop. The new webshop is mutlidomain/multilanguage so the English version is at the .com extension and the germand version at the .de extension etc. etc. We redirected the 2 best old webshops to the .com extention with a htaccess 301 redirect. The other old webshops we divided over the other extensions. We redirected the 200 most importent pages with a page to page redirect and redirected the other indexed pages to the new index page. (300K) Everything went well and the new website started indexing. All extentions are doing well and even the .com version had very good rankings for a few days. After a few days we almost lost all rankings to the .com version. We did always clean seo, had 100% unique content written by our own writers and translated by our own translators. Our old webshops have very good branche related backlinks and i can`t find anything else then the 300K redirects to the homepage that might be the problem. Hope somebody will help us, or know someone we can hire to check our webmaster account, and check everything we did.
International SEO | | snorkel0 -
Intentional redirect for international visitors to a website
We are doing PPC for a new client, and using Clicktale to improve conversion rates. However, Clicktale won't work because the client does not want international visitors looking at their website (competitive reasons! - yeah don't get me started...). They have a redirect on for all international visitors which points to a "coming soon..." page Are there any SEO implications on traffic in their own country (they currently do rank for terms)? I'd like to go back with a strong case for them removing any international redirect. Thank You
International SEO | | CleverClicks0 -
Geotargeting two locations using root and /country
Hello, I am in the process of turning my UK targeted website into a global website in multiple languages. I will be using the new HREFLANG tag but I'm wondering about geotargeting. I've set this up in Webmaster Tools as: example.com = UK content
International SEO | | Seaward-Group
example.com/us = US content
example.com/de = German content
example.com/es = Spanish content
example.com/fr = French content
example.com/it = Italian content
example.com/nl = Dutch content Will the root UK content override the following sub directories that are set as a different location because its not /uk? Thank you.0 -
What is the best way to make country specific IP redirect for only product pricng pages?
My website has 3 services and its price will be different for US/EU/Developed world and Asian/African countries.Apart from pricing page, all other things remain same. I want to use IP based redirect .I heard this thing is called cloaking and used by black-hat guys. What kind of instructions should I give to my web developer to look best to Google/Search bots and correctly show visitors the intended prices.Is there any caution to be taken care of. Thanks for your time
International SEO | | RyanSat0