Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
-
Hello all
Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve.
Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country.
Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country.
The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following:
www.example.com/ca-en
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
...If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en
We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags.
Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions:
1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections?2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly.
I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure.
Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance. -
For geo-redirects, I do not recommend you use 301 redirects. Browsers can cache these, so if you tell a browser in Canada that example.com should redirect to www.example.com/ca-fr, and later the user changes their language to English, and then tries to go www.example.com, the browser could use that redirect again to go back to the French version without hitting your server. 301 tells the browser that www.example.com ALWAYS (permanently) goes to www.example.com/ca-fr. Page rank isn't really a consideration with these, since Googlebot always comes from the US, so it should never hit these redirects. If example.com always goes to one of the versions via a redirect (i.e. you don't serve content under that root URL), then you do have a bit of problem with redirects. You don't want to 302 Googlebot to another page for your home page, but at the same time, you want to avoid weird redirect behaviors for your customers.
Google can visit the international versions directly without redirects, right? They should have no problem indexing those pages then.
I agree with István, get some local links to your different local versions, register them each with Google Webmaster Tools (and Bing), put up sitemaps for each, and implement the hreflang tags in your sitemaps (or pages). That way Google can easily index each version, and knows exactly what each version is for.
-
Other opinions are highly appreciated, Thanks for everyone in advance.
-
Thanks István Keszeg for your clear and detailed answer.
I still have some questions:
1- redirection will not be for 1 version, but for several pages (ca-en, us-en, uk-en) then would the link juice be divided on these 3 version? put in other words, will that effect our current SEO ranking for the words we are currently ranked for?
2- (point no . 2 in my first post).
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Marcel,
Let us not forget that in order to be able to rank with your website, you will have to give the possibilities for Search Engines to make 3 steps: 1. Crawl 2. Index 3. Rank
One of the best solutions that I have seen for your case is what Specialized Bikes uses (www.specialized.com
So As I have seen they have an IP sniffing on the main address only: www.specialized.com which will then redirect you to your location's store (for me it is http://www.specialized.com/ro/en/home/ for a person from the US it should be http://www.specialized.com/us/en/home/ and so on for each country which they have specified).
This is good, because then in Google Webmasters Tools they can create separate profiles for each folder: /ro/ /us/ /fr/ etc.
This means that they can still create a sitemap.xml for each of the "stores" and they can submit the sitemaps from Google Webmaster's Tools and avoid crawling issues. (And if you check via proxy different local Google results, you will see that they still rank quite good).
The problem comes with the same language content on different countries where you could:
- insert Hreflang
- get local some nice LOCAL links for both
(at least this is what I would try to do)
Now to respond your question, I quote:
1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
A: This wont be a temporary redirect, so be sure to use 301! 302 redirect will retain the "link juice" on the old version. For reference check the following article of Dr. Pete: http://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
A: Depends who do you redirect to.
P.S. As you mentioned you will have duplicate content issue because of us-en and ca-en, which Ideally it shouldn't be a problem:
“Duplicate content and international sites
_Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries.” _Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections?
I wouldn't advise you to do so. If it is a permanent redirection, let it be a 301.
So before making the huge step, I would advise you to go through some steps:
- create a full list of incoming links
- Sort your list of links for relevance, quality and geo-location
- Make the change in the URL system
- Start contacting your most important linking partners and kindly ask them to change the old links into the new versions (from example.com to example.com/us/en/ or if it is a French link from Canada then from current version to the example.com/ca/fr/ version and so on)
I know it is really a huge work, but it will grow its fruits.
Good luck!
Istvan
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
-
301 Redirect in breadcrumb. How bad is it?
Hi all, How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects? We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb. SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404. However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months. could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
Will 301 Redirects Slow Page Speed?
We have a lot of subdomains that we are switching to subfolders and need to 301 redirect all the pages from those subdomains to the new URL. We have over 1000 that need to be implemented. So, will 301 redirects slow the page speed regardless of which URL the user comes through? Or, as the old urls are dropped from Google's index and bypassed as the new URLs take over in the SERPs, will those redirects then have no effect on page speed? Trying to find a clear answer to this and have yet to find a good answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
How to handle potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following a major site replacement
We are looking for the very best way of handling potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeezerG
a major site replacement and I mean total replacement. Things you should know
Existing domain has 17 years history with Google but rankings have suffered over the past year and yes we know why. (and the bitch is we paid a good sized SEO company for that ineffective and destructive work)
The URL structure of the new site is completely different and SEO friendly URL's rule. This means that there will be many thousands of historical URL's (mainly dynamic ones) that will attract 404 errors as they will not exist anymore. Most are product profile pages and the God Google has indexed them all. There are also many links to them out there.
The new site is fully SEO optimised and is passing all tests so far - however there is a way to go yet. So here are my thoughts on the possible ways of meeting our need,
1: Create 301 redirects for each an every page in the .htaccess file that would be one huge .htaccess file 50,000 lines plus - I am worried about effect on site speed.
2: Create 301 redirects for each and every unused folder, and wildcard the file names, this would be a single redirect for each file in each folder to a single redirect page
so the 404 issue is overcome but the user doesn't open the precise page they are after.
3: Write some code to create a hard copy 301 index.php file for each and every folder that is to be replaced.
4: Write code to create a hard copy 301 .php file for each and every page that is to be replaced.
5: We could just let the pages all die and list them with Google to advise of their death.
6: We could have the redirect managed by a database rather than .htaccess or single redirect files. Probably the most challenging thing will be to load the data in the first place, but I assume this could be done programatically - especially if the new URL can be inferred from the old. Many be I am missing another, simpler approach - please discuss0 -
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 -
301 Redirect Showing Up as Thousands Of Backlinks?
Hi Everyone, I'm currently doing quite a large back link audit on my company's website and there's one thing that's bugging me. Our website used to be split into two domains for separate areas of the business but since we have merged them together into one domain and have 301 redirected the old domain the the main one. But now, both GWT and Majestic are telling me that I've got 12,000 backlinks from that domain? This domain didn't even have 12,000 pages when it was live and I only did specific 301 redirects (ie. for specific URL's and not an overall domain level 301 redirect) for about 50 of the URL's with all the rest being redirected to the homepage. Therefore I'm quite confused about why its showing up as so many backlinks - Old redirects I've done don't usually show as a backlink at all. UPDATE: I've got some more info on the specific back links. But now my question is - is having this many backlinks/redirects from a single domain going to be viewed negatively in Google's eyes? I'm currently doing a reconsideration request and would look to try and fix this issue if having so many backlinks from a single domain would be against Google's guidelines. Does anybody have any ideas? Probably somthing very obvious. Thanks! Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
303 redirect
Hi, 303 redirect is a good thing or not ? I have a homepage in 2 languages FR and EN > mywebsite.com/fr/ and mywebsite.com/en/. A 303 redirect is on mywebsite.com to mywebsite.com/fr/. Thanks D.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon0 -
Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?
Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names. The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to? It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule0 -
GeoIP - Redirect all but target country
My client would like to redirect all non UK traffic from their UK site to their main group site. I am intending to use a .htaccess redirect, like this: RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} !^GB$
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.group.com$1 [R,L] I have tested the redirect at it works fine. My question is if I put this in place would it have any negative SEO impact on the UK site?0