Managing international sites

[Mediatomcat]

Hi all,

I am trying to figure out the best way to manage our international sites.  We have two locations, 1 in the UK and 1 in the USA.  I currently use GEOIP to identify the location of the browser and redirect them using a cookie to index.php?country=uk or index.php?country=usa.  Once the cookie is set I use a 301 redirect to send them to index.php, so that Google doesnt see each url as duplicate content, which Webmaster tools was complaining about.

This has been working wonderfully for about a year.  It means I have a single php language include file and depending on the browser location I will display $ or £ and change the odd ise to ize, etc.

Problem I am starting to notice is that we are starting to rank better and better in the USA search result.  I am guessing this is because the crawlers must be based out of the USA.  This is great, but my concern is that I am losing rank in the UK, which is currently where most of our business is done out of...

So I have done my research and because I have a .net will go for a /uk/ or /us/ sub folder and create two separate webmaster tools site and set them up to target each geographic location.  Is this okay?  http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#2

HERE IS THE PROBLEM: I don't was to have to run two separate website with two separate sets of copy.  Also, I dont want to lose all the rank data on urls like:  http://www.mysite.net/great-rank-result.html now becomes  http://www.mysite.net/uk/great-rank-result.html.  On top of this I will have two pages, the one just mentioned and now adding http://www.mysite.net/us/great-rank-result.html, which I presume would be seen as duplicate copy? (Y/n)

Can I use rel canonical to overcome this?  How can I don't this without actually running the two pages.  Could you actually have 1 site in the root folder and just use the same GEOIP techology to do a smart MOD REWRITE adding either UK or US to the url therefore being able to create two webmaster accounts targeting each geographic location?

Any advise is most welcome.

[Audiohype]

I would canonicalise the index.php and non index.php versions to avoid duplicate content here and ensure that the weight is combined into one version.

You may find that your rankings have changes as a result of this redirect process based on IP.

As far as I can see, any links that point to your homepage go through this process:

link -> www.mysite.com

--301--> www.mysite.net/index.php?country=usa/uk

--301--> www.mysite.net/index.php

This is going to send the links on a chain of 301's eventually ending up with duplicate content, which isn't best practise. Hopefully someone else can chip in on this one and advise if this is the case and potential solutions.

[irvingw]

If you already have http://www.mysite.net/great-rank-result.html and it is ranking good,  i would use that as the US version and don't create/redirect to http://www.mysite.net/us/great-rank-result.html. In other words US is the default. If you redirect you are losing page juice for no reason.

This can be tricky what you are trying to do because they are both in the English language and cultural variations aren't enough to create uniqueness. You should include UK and/or United Kingdom in your title tag and meta descriptions so that your tags are all unique! Also sends the signal to Google about the region. That content should be at least once on every page and custom footers and headers created of course for the UK template. If you have a UK office location use list it in the UK, same with the US and use microformats.

In most cases if you target the country correctly Google will get it right, but it's not guaranteed and results could get filtered (it's not a penalty) and if you come across this you would probably need to rewrite content which may or may not be an option depending on the size of your site and value of your business in that region.

Please thumbs up or mark as a good answer if this helps you out thanks

[Mediatomcat]

I guess so.  It will either push it into /us/ or /uk/

[Audiohype]

Does this mean that Google will no longer see www.mysite.net then?

With www.mysite.net and www.mysite.net/index.php being different URLs this may mean that there is duplicate content between these two pages.

[Mediatomcat]

So Google was seeing my www.mysite.net/index.php?country=usa and www.mysite.net/index.php?country=uk as two separate pages and reporting it as duplicate content.  So I have 1) created a canonical as www.mysite.net/index.php and do a redirect from www.mysite.net/index.php?country=usa/uk to www.mysite.net/index.php once the cookie has been set.  This seems to have solved that problem.

[Audiohype]

It would seem that the best solution is the URL structure that you have suggested, but with unique content. I know you don't want to do this but you will run into duplication issues if you don't.

If I understand correctly, the search engines will only see the index.php with the US language on it? You don't have canonical issues do you? i.e. when you say you redirect them to index.php, do you mean the root (www.domain.net) or the actual index URL (www.domain.net/index.php)? - ideally these two should be the same thing.