Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
-
Hello all
Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve.
Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country.
Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country.
The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following:
www.example.com/ca-en
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
...If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en
We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags.
Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions:
1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections?2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly.
I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure.
Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance. -
For geo-redirects, I do not recommend you use 301 redirects. Browsers can cache these, so if you tell a browser in Canada that example.com should redirect to www.example.com/ca-fr, and later the user changes their language to English, and then tries to go www.example.com, the browser could use that redirect again to go back to the French version without hitting your server. 301 tells the browser that www.example.com ALWAYS (permanently) goes to www.example.com/ca-fr. Page rank isn't really a consideration with these, since Googlebot always comes from the US, so it should never hit these redirects. If example.com always goes to one of the versions via a redirect (i.e. you don't serve content under that root URL), then you do have a bit of problem with redirects. You don't want to 302 Googlebot to another page for your home page, but at the same time, you want to avoid weird redirect behaviors for your customers.
Google can visit the international versions directly without redirects, right? They should have no problem indexing those pages then.
I agree with István, get some local links to your different local versions, register them each with Google Webmaster Tools (and Bing), put up sitemaps for each, and implement the hreflang tags in your sitemaps (or pages). That way Google can easily index each version, and knows exactly what each version is for.
-
Other opinions are highly appreciated, Thanks for everyone in advance.
-
Thanks István Keszeg for your clear and detailed answer.
I still have some questions:
1- redirection will not be for 1 version, but for several pages (ca-en, us-en, uk-en) then would the link juice be divided on these 3 version? put in other words, will that effect our current SEO ranking for the words we are currently ranked for?
2- (point no . 2 in my first post).
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Marcel,
Let us not forget that in order to be able to rank with your website, you will have to give the possibilities for Search Engines to make 3 steps: 1. Crawl 2. Index 3. Rank
One of the best solutions that I have seen for your case is what Specialized Bikes uses (www.specialized.com
So As I have seen they have an IP sniffing on the main address only: www.specialized.com which will then redirect you to your location's store (for me it is http://www.specialized.com/ro/en/home/ for a person from the US it should be http://www.specialized.com/us/en/home/ and so on for each country which they have specified).
This is good, because then in Google Webmasters Tools they can create separate profiles for each folder: /ro/ /us/ /fr/ etc.
This means that they can still create a sitemap.xml for each of the "stores" and they can submit the sitemaps from Google Webmaster's Tools and avoid crawling issues. (And if you check via proxy different local Google results, you will see that they still rank quite good).
The problem comes with the same language content on different countries where you could:
- insert Hreflang
- get local some nice LOCAL links for both
(at least this is what I would try to do)
Now to respond your question, I quote:
1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
A: This wont be a temporary redirect, so be sure to use 301! 302 redirect will retain the "link juice" on the old version. For reference check the following article of Dr. Pete: http://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
A: Depends who do you redirect to.
P.S. As you mentioned you will have duplicate content issue because of us-en and ca-en, which Ideally it shouldn't be a problem:
“Duplicate content and international sites
_Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries.” _Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections?
I wouldn't advise you to do so. If it is a permanent redirection, let it be a 301.
So before making the huge step, I would advise you to go through some steps:
- create a full list of incoming links
- Sort your list of links for relevance, quality and geo-location
- Make the change in the URL system
- Start contacting your most important linking partners and kindly ask them to change the old links into the new versions (from example.com to example.com/us/en/ or if it is a French link from Canada then from current version to the example.com/ca/fr/ version and so on)
I know it is really a huge work, but it will grow its fruits.
Good luck!
Istvan
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
-
301 redirect hops from non-https and www
It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop. It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain. The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not In which case, you could have: Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page. Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
For how long does Google honor a 302 redirect?
Greetings! I would love some recent experiences to support our experience which is +/- 1 year old on this question. Based on our experiences around a year ago, I believe that Google will only honor a 302 temporary redirect for a relatively short period - perhaps up to a month - and then it will begin treating the redirect as a 301 redirect and will remove the old page from the index. Have others seen this? Is there an update on what the max "safe" period to have a 302 in place could be? We have a domain that is soon to experience about 3 months of "downtime" with no content on it, but the content will be back after that time. Ideally we would 302 redirect the pages elsewhere just for that downtime period. However, I don't want to do a 302 redirect if there is a risk that the pages will lose all of their accumulated authority and indexing. Basically, is there any safe way to just put the domain on ice for a few months? Please share recent experience only. Thanks for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | g-s-m0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page
Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!0 -
301 or 302 Redirects to Mobile Site
When it's detected that a mobile device is accessing the site it has the ability to redirect from www.example.com to m.example.com. Does it make more sense to employ a 301 or 302 redirect here? Google says a 301 but does not explain why (although usually I stick to "when in doubt, 301") . It seems like a 302 would prevent passing link juice to the mobile site and having mobile-optimized results also showing up in Google's index. What is the preference here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTGT0 -
301 redirect from .html to non .html?
Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html. I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection. I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do: The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0