IP redirect possible SEO issues?

[tidybooks]

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)

www.tidy-bboks.com.au (AU)

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

[mememax]

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!

[tidybooks]

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.

[mememax]

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

[gfiorelli1]

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.

[mememax]

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.