International IP redirection - help please!
-
Hi,
We have a new client who has built a brand in the UK on a xyz.com domain. The "xyz.com" is now a brand and features on all marketing. Lots of SEO work has taken place and the UK site has good rankings and traffic.
They have now expanded to the US and with offline marketing leading the way, xyz.com is the brand being pushed in the US.
So with the launch of the offline marketing US IP's are now redirected to a US version of the site (subfolder) with relevant pricing and messaging. This is great for users, but with Googlebot being on a US IP it is also being redirected and the UK pages have now dropped out of the index.
The solution we need would ideally have both UK and US users searching for xyz.com, but would see them land on respective static pages with correct prices. Ideally no link authority would be moved via redirection of users.
We have considered the following solutions
-
Move UK site to subfolder /uk and redirect UK ips to this subfolder (and so not googlebot)
-
downside of this is it will massively impact the UK rankings which are the core driver of the business - also would this be deemed as illegal cloaking?
-
natural links will always be to the xyz.com page and so longer term the US homepage will gain authority and UK homepage will be more reliant on artificial linkbuilding.
-
Use a overlay that detects IP address and requests users to select relevant country (and cookies to redirect on second visit)
-
this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences.
-
Use a homepage with country selection (and cookies to redirect on second visit)
-
this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences.
Is there an easy solution to this problem that we're overlooking?
Is there another way of legal cloaking we could use here?
Many thanks in advance for any help here
-
-
You can use hreflang & Alternate tag to solve this CCTLD duplication issue. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
-
Hannah,
We are currently in the requirements phase for an international.xyz.com ecommerce web site. Your overlay recommendation is appreciated and makes sense, but I'm just wondering about the duplicate content issue. Xyz.com and international.xyz.com will essentially be the same sites and both in English, with slight variances in the brand selection and some customer service-oriented messaging. Any insights would be appreciated.
-
Hi Ralph,
Sounds good to me
Also great shout re first click free!
Hannah
-
Thanks Hannah. I think we have managed to convince them to go with a separate site on .co.uk which has always been my preferred approach to international SEO.
I'm always worried that even with the right intentions, there is still a risk of Google misinterpreting.
Separate domains means no confusion.
As for overlays, it works very well for another client of ours and makes no difference to bounce rate. One lesson we did learn was to ensure we had first click free activated!!
-
Hi Ralph,
Using an IP redirect to serve country-specific content to the user is fine (i.e. it isn't considered to be cloaking as your intent isn't manipulative). However, there are issues with doing so - as you've highlighted - you're also redirecting the bots so have seen the UK site suffer.
Because of these issues I don't normally recommend the IP redirect approach. I also think that it can be bad for users too - just because someone is in the UK right now - doesn't necessarily mean that they want to see UK content - e.g. they may just be here temporarily on holiday / on business etc.
Personally I would prefer the javascript overlay (your option two) which allows users to pick the relevant country rather than implementing a hard redirect. This will also allow the bots to index both versions of your site.
I do understand the ecommerce team's concerns over this increasing bounce rate - but I'd suggest that if it's implemented well - check out amazon.co.uk from the US - this shouldn't cause you problems with bounce rate.
Likewise I understand their concerns re US / UK customers seeing the wrong content and therefore exposing the price differences - however, again I'd suggest that it's probably more important to have both versions of the site indexed.
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
Thanks for reply, yes its definietly a hole. The more i research the deeper it seems to get. It wasn't our recommendation for the current solution (decided in house) so luckily its not a hole I've dug even though I'm now in it!
-
looks like you have dug yourselfs a hole.
you could with a bit of work, detect where the vistits have come from, and then show prices relevent to the vistis, you will not be done for clocking in this case. There is geo locating solutions out there for detection, and you could write a function that can sort price and then replace all the prices with the function something like @GetCorrectPrice(19.99)
As far as i can tell about clocking by the way, you dont get dome for clocking unless you are trying to decive, if they detect clocking the will have a human look and see why and what you are doing.
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
-
Multistore 302 Redirects
I noticed that every link on my site is being flagged up as a 302 temp redirect in Moz. The reason is because we have a multi store and use GeoIP to redirect anyone coming from their respective country. I'm guessing a 302 is the wrong way to do this - can anyone shed advice on the best practice for redirecting customers to geo-specific stores?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
301 redirect with DNS?
Quick question. Is it possible to 301 redirect a non-www to www. (properly in terms of SEO) with DNS (C Name, A name, or other) ..have searched around and found conflicting information. Would like to know a definite answer. I usually implement all 301 redirects with htaccess. However have a client situation where we only have access to the CMS, but which does have DNS settings. thanks in advance, Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregDixson0 -
301 redirects Ruby on Rails
Can anyone point me to the best way to implement 301 redirects on a Ruby on Rails website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Bulk redirect or only a few pages at a time
Dear all, I would very much like to have your advise about whether or not to implement bulk 301 redirects. We have 3 retail websites with the same technical architecture, namely: Netherlands-example.nl Belgium-example.be France-example.fr These three websites are all bilingual, namely: Netherlands-example.nl/nl Netherlands-example.nl/fr Belgium-example.be/nl Belgium-example.be/fr France-example.fr/nl France-example.fr/fr We’re going to do a CMS update and therefore we have to change a bulk of 301 redirects: Part 1: For France (France-example.fr) URL’s in the Dutch language (France-example.fr/nl) will be redirected to Belgium (Belgium-example.be/nl). It’s a matter of about 8.000 redirects. Part 2: For the Netherlands (Netherlands-example.nl) URL’s in the French language (Netherlands-example.nl/fr ) will be redirected to Belgium (Belgium-example.be/fr). It’s also a matter of about 8.000 redirects. Question:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footsteps
What will be the best way to implement these redirects? Fully implement part 1 first (8.000 redirects) and then a couple of weeks/months later a full implement of part 2? Or will it be better to implement small batches like 200-500 per 2 weeks? I’d like to hear your opinion. Thanks in advance. Kind regards, Gerwin0 -
International Subdomain Headache
My client set up a separate domain for their international clients, then set up separate subdomains for each country where they're active (so, for example, the original site is xx.com and the global is xxworldwide.com, with subdomains like mx.xxxworldwide.com). They auto-translated a large amount of content and put the translations on those international sites. The idea was to draw in native speakers. Now, I don't think this is a great practice, obviously, and I'm worried that it could hurt their original site (the xxx.com in the example above). My concern is that Google will see through the translated text, since it was handled with Google Translate, and penalize both sites. I don't think the canonical tag applies here, since Google recommends a no-follow for autotranslated text, but I've also never dealt with this type of situation before. Anyways, if you made it through all of that, congratulations. My question is whether xxx.com is getting any negative effects other than a potential loss of link juice -- and whether there's any legitimate way to present auto-translated text with a few minor changes without incurring a penalty.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ask44435230 -
Please, help me to understand these Google results
Hello here, I am eager to know your thoughts on this. If I search on Google for "fur elise violin sheet music", we are on the second page for our sheet music title of "Fur Elise for violin and piano" (look for "virtualsheetmusic.com"). Ok, that's not very good and I still have an hard time to figure out why there are many crappy and NOT really related websites listed before us, but here is the best (weird) part... .... search now for "fur elise violin and piano sheet music" which should narrow the query further down and so increase the chances for us to get on the first page results... and in fact we are on the first page with that query, but for a different page and a different music for a different instrument! If you scroll the first page of the results, you will find our site at the end of the 1st page for our version of "Fur Elise" for "viola and piano" and not for "violin and piano"... What the heck!??! Why's that??? Doesn't make any sense too me... why if the user search for "fur elise violin and piano" Google shows "Fur Elise for viola and piano"???!! I would really appreciate any thoughts on all this. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Temporary Redirects on Magento
I've recently taken over a client who uses the Magento platform and there was definitely a duplicate issue with his homepage. It redirected www to non www, however the canonical tag was setup wrong and pointing to the www version. When I looked at OSE for both versions the non www has only 7 linking domains and a page authority of 32. The www version has 24 linking domains and page authority of 39. As the domain is fairly new, I decided to redirect the non www to www and keep the canonical the same. (I changed the internal linking structure etc). When I run both URLs through this tool: http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-... it's returning a whole bunch of 302, rather than 301 redirects. What's the deal with that? Is that a Magento setting that I can fix or something a little harder? I'm not sure if it's proper etiquette to post the URL of a client, so if that would help and is OK, please let me know. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bradkrussell1 -
Internal structure update
How often does google update the internal linking structure of a website ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0