Using the same domain for two websites (for different geographical locations)

[skifr]

Hi all,

My client has a new E-commerce site coming out in few months.
His requirement is to use the same domain (lets call it www.domain.com for now) for two seperate websites:
The first site, for users with ip addresses from USA - which will include prices in US dollars.
The second site - for users outside of the US - will not include any prices, and will have different pages and design.

Now, lets say that googlebot crawls the websites from different ip ranges. How can i make sure a user from France, for example, won't see crawled pages from the US? Sure, once he will click the result, I can redirect him to a "Sorry, but this content is unavailable in your country" page. The problem is, I don't want a user from France to see the in the search results the meta description snippets of pages related only to users in the US (in some cases, the snippets may include the prices in $).
Is Geotargeting through Webmaster Tools can help in this case? I know I can target a part of the website for a specific country (e.g. - www.domain.com/us/), but how can I make sure global users won't see the pages targeted only to the US in the search results?

Thanks in Advance

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Just to add to what Martijn has said, you should be able to specify the pages that target the US with this tag and leave the pages for international users unspecified. This means creating different pages / URLs of course, rather than using IP detection which isn't advised for changing content.

[skifr]

Thank you for your answer Martijn.

The problem is, the second website is not for French users specifically - it is a global website targeted to all users outside of the US. If there is no specific country, I'm afraid i won't be able to use the rel="alternate" annotation.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Sfkir,

I would try to look into using the REL alternate tags, more information can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en you can point from the US pages to the pages in French and vice versa. In most cases this will make sure that Google is able to tell that the US pages won't be shown in a search from France but only the French pages will show up. It was of great help to us for a project where we have our content in different languages.