Queston about subdomains for SEO Gurus
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What is the best way to deal with a blog acting as subdomain (blog.domain.com) when you have 3 regional website versions (uk.domain.com, us.domain.com, and fr.domain.com)?
I am facing a big problem for proper distribution of link juice to the three main websites. The point is that I have one blog, in which I have general content not targeting any specific market, but the link juice cannot be distributed properly across three websites, because I have a script to determine visitor’s region and serve him the right regional website.
It uses a geoip script for Apache to redirect a visitor to their proper subdomain by determining which continent they are connecting from based off their IP address. Apache can use any type of redirect for this purpose, but we're using 302 to maintain user experience without using a 301 which might permanently redirect a crawler to only one version of the website.
That cannot be done without 302 redirect, which means sending no link juice from the blog subdomain to the main websites.
So, when you click on the logo from blog.domian.com, the script determines visitor region, and then 302 to the proper website.
I don’t have main domain like www.domain.com. Instead the script is acting on this domain so that it 302 redirects to regional website according user location.
The situation is complicated because you can’t send equal link juice to 3 regional website, having only one general blog.
Even worse, none of the regional websites receives link juice from neither individual posts, nor blog.domain.com because of the 302 redirect.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks.
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I was thinking about your first opinion, however on that way, only home pages of the three regional versions will receive link juice from blog posts, and other pages won't
I'm not sure if the link juice accumulated to the home page will be well passed to other pages on this way.
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This might be overly simplistic but why not just have a "translation" or some other similar type of link accompany each blog post. Something along the lines of:
Post title:
post content
want more information about your region visit our "UK" "french" "us" website for more content in your area.
An alternative route would be to go with subfolders instead of subdomains. Each regional version could be in a corresponding subfolder of your website, instead of subdomain and that way your link equity would be shared without the need for any additional linking as everything would be under one top level domain.
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