Redirecting the .com of our site
-
Hey guys,
A company I consult for has a different site for its users depending on the geography. Example:
When a visitor goes to www.company.com if the user is from the EU, it gets redirected to http://eu.company.com
If the user is from the US, it goes to http://us.company.com
And so on.
I have two questions:
Does having a redirect on the .com will influence rankings on each specific sub-site? I suspect it will affect the .com since it will simply not get indexed but not sure if affects the sub domains.
The content on this sub-sites are not different (I´m still trying to figure out why they are using the sub-domains). Will they get penalized for duplicate content?
Thanks!
-
Thank you Gianluca!
As always, your advice is top notch.
Cheers!
F.
-
As written by David Sottimano in a comment to my post about International SEO, first consider this:
"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." - support.google.com source
Ask your client this: is it absolutely necessary to deliver the Irish user exclusively to the Irish site? Should the Irish user be able to see other sites?
If the answers are yes and no respectively, you can get away with IP sniffing & server side redirects as long as you do not force redirection on American IPs (Note: Gbot still crawls from the US, but if they change, this won't work). The downsides; usability issues, and the fact that American IPs can see anything they want.
You could also use client side redirection (javascript) with even American IPs with no real consequence (Gbot shouldn't* execute the JS). This is a bit more flimsy, and won't work at all with JS disabled users. Maybe use http://www.wipmania.com/en/api/ for example, and maybe test to see what pisses people off less?
Said that... I would not use geo redirections, but present a box hover or bar (as it does Google when you visit, for instance, Google.it from Finland) where asking if the want to visit the .eu site or prefer to visit the US one (and vice versa). That way you are sure your site will be crawled with not problems (at least not this problem).
For the duplicated content issue, check out what I write about the rel="alternate" hreflang in my post here on Moz.
-
Anyone else?
-
Anyone else can shed some light on this?
Thanks!
-
Hello,
Redirecting your main domain to sub-domain isn't a good technique in seo practice however it is still useful having some strong reason. As you said your client want a redirect based on geographical location and goes to sub-domain etc. In this matter I just wanna say it is extremely dangerous idea because of providing same content using different URLs could be a penalty be Google. It could be acceptable if you provide language translations with your sub-domains.
I hope this would be helpful to you.
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
-
CGI Redirects
Trying to 301 old legacy files like oldsite.com/green/red.cgi/blue/ using this htaccess code: Redirect 301 /green/red.cgi/blue/ http://www.newsite.com/summary-page/
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer8
Instead it's redirecting to: newsite.com/red.cgi/blue/ FYI oldsite.com's htaccess file does not have any global 301 rules that would conflict Does anyone know if cgi files require a different 301 syntax? Thanks!0 -
Redirecting homepage to subdirectory
Any issues with 301 redirecting a site's homepage to the English version subdirectory? Example: Original homepage: www.mysite.com New homepage: www.mysite.com/en/ The site is very old and very authoritative and trusted with lots of traffic.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Www.xyz.com v/s xyz.com creating duplicate pages
I just put my site in moz analytics. The crawl results says I have duplicate content. When I look at the pages it is because one page is www.xyz.com and the duplicate is xyz.com. What causes this and how can it be fixed. I'm not a developer, so be kind and speak a language I can understand. Thanks for your help 🙂
Technical SEO | | Britewave0 -
.htaccess redirects
I've done some research but can't find a good answer to this question. Here's my situation: Site redirects from example.com to www.example.com just fine. However, it doesn't work so well for internal pages. My site incorrectly redirects (non-www) example.com/page2 to www.example.com when it should instead go to www.example.com/page2 So I need a method to redirect non-www internal pages to www versions. Currently I have this in my .htaccess - do I need to modify the rules? RewriteEngine on
Technical SEO | | 3plains
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] Thanks0 -
If you are organizing the site structure for an ecommerce site, how would you do it?
Should you use not use slashes and use all dashes or use just a few slashes and the rest with dashes? For example, domain.com/category/brand/product-color-etc OR domain.com/anythinghere-color-dimensions-etc Which structure would you rather go for and why?
Technical SEO | | Zookeeper0 -
Holy Redirects
Currently working on a project for a medium sized site (http://sleeponcall.com/) but the SEOMoz crawl crawled over 14,000 pages because the report is showing more than 8,000 redirects. The client has no clue how this happened as their previous web programmers may not have been on the ball. What could be causing the problem and what is the best way to untangle this mess?
Technical SEO | | Nobody15330770827560 -
Moving Duplicate Sites
Apologies in advance for the complexity. My client, company A, has purchased company B in the same industry, with A and B having separate domains. Current hosting arrangement combines registrar and hosting functions in 1 account so as to allow both domains to point to a common folder, with the result that identical content is displayed for both A & B. The current site is kind of an amalgam of A and B. Company A has decided to rebrand and completely absorb company B. The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A. The current (only) hosting package is Windows, and I am creating a new site and moving them to Linux with another hosting company. I can use 301's for A , but not for B as it is a separate domain and currently shares a hosting package with A. How can I best preserve the link juice that domain B has? The only conclusion I can come up with is to set up separate Linux hosting for B which will allow for the use of 301's. Does anyone have a better idea?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Canonical on ecommerce site
I have read tons of guides about canonical implementaiton but still am confused about how I should best use it. On my site with tens of thousands of urls and thousands of afiiliates and shopping networks sending traffic, is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url. In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes? Is there a better way to handle this? Also is there any potential problems with rolling out the tag to all pages if they are simply refrencing themselves in the tag? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Gordian0