GEO IP Redirects affecting Organic Rankings

[demacmedia]

Not sure if anyone has ever had this problem. We have a client who is a UK based retailer with a large retail presence in Canada and a U.S site as well. For the past year while keeping track of their rankings, they steadily ranked #1 for their brand term on Google.CA. At the end of June we implemented a GEO IP redirect for U.S visitors to be redirected to the U.S site if they clicked on the .CA listing. Over the next two weeks the ranking for the single branded keyword went from #1 to completely off the top 50.

Could this have possibly happened due to the GEO IP redirect? The .CO.UK site has always been top 3 in the organic listing and is still #1 but in Google.ca the Canadian site has dropped off completely after consistently ranking #1.

[demacmedia]

Hi Hannah, thank you very much, I really do appreciate the response, that is very helpful.

[Hannah_Smith]

Hey Matthew,

In short yes, it's entirely possible that it's down to the IP redirect.

Googlebot typical crawls from the US, and as such is likely to be redirected too. Essentially you've made the .ca site invisible as far as Google are concerned.

For that reason rather than doing a hard redirect I prefer Amazon's approach - if you visit Amazon.com from a UK IP you'll see a message which says: "Shopping from the UK? Visit Amazon.co.uk.".

That way users get the nudge to direct them to the right site and the bots can still crawl and index all of your content.

I hope this helps,

Hannah