IP redirect possible SEO issues?
-
Hi
I help manage a small eCommerce business that sells worldwide. We currently have 4 stores
www.tidy-books.com (US site)
www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK)
www.tidy-books.eu (EU)
We have auto redirect based on the country of your IP.
The .com is the route address though.
Currently I have decided to focus all my energies with link building etc on .com as it seems to carry the most weight and being a very small team we don't have the resources for separate campaigns for all websites at the moment. Whilst I've done on site SEO with country in mind i.e for US kids instead of children.
I'm just wondering if you can see any pitfalls in this approach, Ideally I would like to have a team focus on each store separately and have them as separate domains but with the IP redirect we at least rank well in Google for the .com and the customers gets sent to the relevant store.
Any thoughts would be great
-
You're welcome Geraldine, hope this solves your doubts. If after speaking with the devs you'll still have some doubts, you know where we are and if you don't find us there's an huge great community of professionals here! Cheers!
-
Hi thanks for all the support this is something I will have to look into with our web developers really appreciate the advice and guidance.
-
Hey Gianluca! thanks for your endorsement. From a geolocalization expert like you is even more gratificant
@Geraldine. Gianluca's last advice is a very good option for your .EU TLD, because normally it doesn't make much sense here in europe due to the high difference we have in such a small space.
In that way you can use that version as the default one and localize your offers for each country. Google normally rewards people using their new standards
-
Hi Geraldine,
the answer given by mememax is correct.
I would add something that I don't really like: tidy.books.eu is not really a great way for targeting the European Countries... because it is not really a ccTLD. It is like the .asia termination, offcially to show the european nature of a site, but it doesn't have any geotargeting power within Europe, as a .co.uk domain name may have in google.co.uk
More over, you can geotarget Europe in GWT.
So, my suggestion is to implement the very new rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" mark up, combined with the more classic rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" one.
That mark-up is telling google that the URLs with it is not targeting any specific language or country, and should be used to be shown in the SERPs to all those users who are targeted by your other sites.
That way your .eu site will be shown in all the European Googles but the .co.uk one (also if they are in another language - i.e.: Spanish - but with the common currency: Euro).
<rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.tidy-books.eu"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-UK" href="http://www.tidy-books.co.uk"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="http://www.tidy-books.com"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-AU" href="http://www.tidy-books.com.au"></rel="alternate">
The only "problem" with this solution is that users from countries you are not targeting with a country targeting site will always see the .eu domain.
-
IP redirect may be tricky since you'll have to maintain that information up to date and be sure that it is working properly. Also there may be users who even staying in a uk ip wants to see the american or eu site, and having the possibility of using the hreflang to set up correctly every site I'll change that strategy to:
- instead of redirecting via IP, I'll consider using that info to show a banner which states, "hey we've seen you're in UK, click here to see the uk version of the site, you'll find many offer based on your country!" (or maybe something shorter than this
- use the hreflang tag to specify to engines which language is optimized for each site, in that way google won't give you duplicate content issues and it will also make the right site ranking depending on the country.
In the short time I'll also give more focus on the .com site because it ahs the widest audience and because it's the most common TLD used for commercial sites. However in the long term you may want to have specialized teams which will make this differences even stronger with an highly focused marketing activity.
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
-
How do you fix redirect chains and temporary redirects?
Hi, I have a lot of issues popping up with temporary redirects and redirect chains. I'm still confused as to what exactly redirect chains are and I don't know how to find where the "chains" are or how to fix them. I'm having two issues mainly:1. Temporary RedirectsI have around 100 pages on our www.twowayradiosfor.com website that are being flagged as temporary redirects. All of them have one thing in common: they are review pages (basically, when a customer clicks on the Review button to review a certain product, they are redirected to a review page for that product).URL Example: https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/reviewhelpful.asp?ProductCode=CLS1410-COMBO&ID=44&yes=noI went into our website and set any URL containing the following as noindex:/review.aspWill that fix the issue? If yes, will I also need to do that for any URL containing /reviewhelpful.asp?2. Redirect ChainsIt seems like basically every product page on my website has this issue (over 100 pages). Here's an example of one:https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/Motorola-CLS1110-p/cls1110.htmI don't see any broken links on this page or links that redirect to another page that redirects, etc. What is causing this? Is it something on my header bar that is redirecting (since that header bar appears on every page, maybe that is why this issue shows up on a lot of pages)?I am new to Moz and still trying to figure this stuff out. I really appreciate any help. Thanks, Sawyer
Technical SEO | | AllChargedUp0 -
My Homepage Won't Load if Javascript is Disabled. Is this an SEO/Indexation issue?
Hi everyone, I'm working with a client who recently had their site redesigned. I'm just going through to do an initial audit to make sure everything looks good. Part of my initial indexation audit goes through questions about how the site functions when you disable, javascript, cookies, and/or css. I use the Web Developer extension for Chrome to do this. I know, more recently, people have said that content loaded by Javascript will be indexed. I just want to make sure it's not hurting my clients SEO. http://americasinstantsigns.com/ Is it as simple as looking at Google's Cached URL? The URL is definitely being indexed and when looking at the text-only version everything appears to be in order. This may be an outdated question, but I just want to be sure! Thank you so much!
Technical SEO | | ccox10 -
Redirect 301 issue. I changed my domain name and Google is killing me.
Hello SEO community: I have this problem, and I don't know exactly what to do. I recently changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com uclasificados.net was a free classified ads for USA in spanish, and was my most affortable site, so I wanted to convert it to .com because I thought it could get more popular with the .com domain. uclasificados.com was before a free classified ads website for Colombia, but was not very popular and had poor traffic so I moved the Colombian content to uclasificados.co. Since I changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com I have lost a lot of ranking, and l my traffic every day is getting lower. I have already checked the 301 redirections and they are working correctly, but even thought I keep getting less traffic and less money. I have also checked with moz tools both sites link juice, and it says that uclasificados.net have better reputation. So I was wondering if I change it back and redirect uclasificados.com to uclasificados.net but I worrie that if I do that, maybe I can make things worse. What do you recommend me?
Technical SEO | | capmartin850 -
Mobile and hidden content - Any issue for SEO?
In reference to mobile - am I walking a fine SEO line when it comes to hidden content on mobile? On the responsive variations of sites we are working on some content is hidden (that displays on the desktop version of the site) so that pages on mobile can display correctly. Is this negative for SEO? Appreciate any feedback Cheers.
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
SEO Audit - Panda
I am looking for a reputable SEO company to help diagnose Panda issues. I am very familiar with SEO and lead an in-house team so I need more than a basic audit. e.g You need unique content
Technical SEO | | WEB-IRS
e.g. You need to create quality content I am looking for someone with a technical mind to help diagnose. Please reach if you have someone in mind.0 -
What's the issue?
Hi, We have a client who dropped in the rankings (initially from bottom of the first page to page to page 3, and now page 5) for a single keyword (their most important one - targeted on their homepage) back in the middle of March. So far, we've found that the issue isn't the following: Keyword stuffing on the page External anchor text pointing to the page Internal anchor text pointing to the page In addition to the above, the drop didn't coincide with panda or penguin. Any other ideas as to what could cause such a drop for a single keyword (other related rankings haven't moved). We're starting to think that this may just have been another small change in the algorithm but it seems like too big of a drop in a short space of time for that to be the case. Any thoughts would be much appreciated! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jasarrow0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hello, We have many pages in our crawler report that are showing duplicate content. However, the content is not duplicateon the pages. It is somewhat close, but different. I am not sure how to fix the problem so it leaves our report. Here is an example. It is showing these as duplicate content to each other. www.soccerstop.com/c-119-womens.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-120-youth.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-124-adult.aspx Any help you could provide would be most appreciated. I am going through our crawler report and resolving issues, and this seems to be big one for us with lots in the report, but not sure what to do about it. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoccerStop
James0