How to test a geo tagged homepage?
-
The e-commerance system we have has a geo tagged hompage system so you can set up different homepages based on the user country IP. But I want to test what the default homepage is, if the system can not get the user IP, does anyone know of a way to do this?
Also does googles bot, not give an IP for this, or is it always an American IP (even if your site is set to a different country)?
Thanks
-
Unfortunately it seems that the e-commerce (which is closed sourced) is built around this geo IP location system.
When I checked the cached version of the site it was indeed the American version, which was just the default simple version of the homepage (no keyword text)
I then google searched stings of texts from our UK / Irish homepages, and no results found
So I then created an American version of the homepage (just a dup of the uk/irish homepages)
A week later did my search test, and got a hit.
Now we are starting to rank for a few more keywords on the homepage
-
I do not recommend redirecting people to different content based on IP. Googlebot may change IP addresses but it's always from the US. This makes it impossible for Googlebot to see any of your international content. You can use the IP address to ask the user if they want to set their settings to a different country and be placed there every time, but do not assume.
-
There are many proxy services out there so you can do Geo Testing. Basically they have a server in that country and using their settings you funnel your requests through that server and it's just like you were in that country. I know there's Wonder Proxy and I'm sure you could find others.
-
I'm not sure about the 'testing tool' thing, but Google says that Googlebot's IP Address changes from 'time to time' but that same explanation says you can look in your website's logs and do a reverse DNS lookup.
In terms of a 'default' page... in my opinion you should ensure you have a standard (unmodified/non-redirected) home page. So if your primary market is the USA then that's the default and then only redirect non-US based folk. That way you determine the default home page and aren't reliant on Googlebot's IP (or any other crawler's for that matter).
Hope this helps.
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 long does Google takes to re-index title tags?
Hi, We have carried out changes in our website title tags. However, when I search for these pages on Google, I still see the old title tags in the search results. Is there any way to speed this process up? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Title Tag vs. H1 / H2
OK, Title tag, no problem, it's the SEO juice, appears on SERP, etc. Got it. But I'm reading up on H1 and getting conflicting bits of information ... Only use H1 once? H1 is crucial for SERP Use H1s for subheads Google almost never looks past H2 for relevance So say I've got a blog post with three sections ... do I use H1 three times (or does Google think you're playing them ...) Or do I create a "big" H1 subhead and then use H2s? Or just use all H2s because H1s are scary? 🙂 I frequently use subheads, it would seem weird to me to have one a font size bigger than another, but of course I can adjust that in settings ... Thoughts? Lisa
Technical SEO | | ChristianRubio0 -
Canonical URL Tag: Confusing Use Case
We have a webpage that changes content each evening at mid-night -- let's call this page URL /foo. This allows a user to bookmark URL /foo and obtain new content each day. In our case, the content on URL /foo for a given day is the same content that exists on another URL on our website. Let's say the content for November 5th is URL /nov05, November 6th is /nov06 and so on. This means on November 5th, there are two pages on the website that have almost identical content -- namely /foo and /nov05. This is likely a duplication of content violation in the view of some search engines. Is the Canonical URL Tag designed to be used in this situation? The page /nov05 is the permanent page containing the content for the day on the website. This means page /nov05 should have a Canonical Tag that points to itself and /foo should have a Canonical Tag that points to /nov05. Correct? Now here is my problem. The page at URL /foo is the fourth highest page authority on our 2,000+ page website. URL /foo is a key part of the marketing strategy for the website. It has the second largest number of External Links second only to our home page. I must tell you that I'm concerned about using a Cononical URL Tag that points away from the URL /foo to a permanent page on the website like /nov05. I can think of a lot of things negative things that could happen to the rankings of the page by making a change like this and I am not sure what we would gain. Right now /foo has a Canonical URL Tag that points to itself. Does anyone believe we should change this? If so, to what and why? Thanks for helping me think this through! Greg
Technical SEO | | GregSims0 -
Rel Canonical tag using Wordpress SEO plugin
Hi team I hope this is the right forum for asking this question. I have a site http://hurunuivillage.com built on Wordpress 3.5.1 using a child theme on Genesis 1.9. We're using Joost's Wordpress SEO plugin and I thought it was configured correctly but the Crawl Diagnostics report has identified an issue with the Rel Canonical tag on the sites pages. I have not edited the plugin settings so am surprised the SEOMoz Crawl has picked up a problem. Example: Page URL is http://hurunuivillage.com/ Tag Value http://hurunuivillage.com/ (exactly the same) Page Authority 39 Linking Root Domains 23 Source Code Considering the popularity of the plugin I'm surprised I have not been able to find tutorials to find what I'm doing wrong or should be doing better. Thanks in advance. Best Nic
Technical SEO | | NicDale0 -
Home link tags slash or full domain name
Recently I was asked the question by a client who has some SEO knowledge..... We built their site and during testing we simply set the home page links to be: home rather than: home This was mainly to help while in test and dev as they were on different servers to the live site and if we had put the full domain in it kept taking us from dev/test to live. Is it bad to have just a slash for SEO purposes or is it REALLY that important on home links to have the full domain as a slash takes you back to the full domain? Thanks
Technical SEO | | spiralsites0 -
Logos and H1 Tags
Would you ever wrap a Logo in an H1 tag? The logo is an image, but is in an area that would cause it to make the most sense when forming my page into a proper hierarchy format. Thanks in advance for any help!
Technical SEO | | smilingbunny0 -
What happens when you put an image in an H1 tag?
I am currently updating some H1 tags for my site but the tags are generated automatically by the text that is entered into a field on our content manager software. However because we need an image in this area as well, the entire field including the code for the image is surrounded by an H1 tag. Is this bad for SEO?
Technical SEO | | eVacStore0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050