IP Address Geolocation SEO - Multiple A records, implications?
-
Hi,
We operate an ecom site, with a .com TLD. The IP address of the hosting is based in France and indeed we seem to see quite a lot of traffic from France.
How relevant is the A record of the domain for SEO? Is it still an important signal to help Google geolocate?
And, if that is the case, is there a case for having multiple A records for the domain? Like an IP Address in France, an IP address in Italy, etc... that way the domain would have multiple A records...
Thank you
-
Thank you.
Our server is fast, hosted in OVH France and we use MaxCDN. Using Magento we can achieve a very low TTFB and load time of around 180ms. We rank better for our kws in France than we do in other European countries although our site is not in French.
Any ideas where I can find a map of european connectivity and hosting companies?
Thanks for your help, I think that we are heading in the right direction!
-
Is terms of SEO, the server location does not carry any value. However, if you site loads really fast to France visitors, it just makes sense to rank your site higher to French visitors (yet again, confirming that server geolocation does not give you any SEO benefit).
As for your question, what you are trying t achieve isn't an easy task and there are entire companies dedicated to just that, DNS based on geolocation (Anycast DNS, Geo-aware DNS), which is what almost all CDNs do, serve the content of a Website from the closest server to a person connecting to a Website. My recommendation? try to get the fastest server you can in the area you mostly want to target (Europe? then get a server that works fast in europe) and then use some CDN service like maxcdn, or cloudflare to serve static, cacheable content from different locations and speed up site loading as much as possible.
That being said, Google offers some tools to help you target specific Countries, Languages regardless of the server location under Google's Webamster Tools.
Hope that 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
-
Is this approach of returning different content depending on IP beneficial for international SEO?
I've decided to use sub folders for my site, and from everything I've read online it seems I shouldn't change the page content depending on IP, yet I know of a successful well funded site that hires full time SEO staff that does just that, and I'm wondering whether they know something I don’t which is helping their SEO. From everything I've read online this is the format I think I should use: mysite.com/us/red-wigs mysite.com/gb/red-wigs mysite.com/red-wigs does not exist This is the format the other site is using: othersite.com/red-wigs (from US IP address) othersite.com/red-wigs (from UK IP address) othersite.com/gb/red-wigs The content on othersite.com/red-wigs is identical to othersite.com/gb/red-wigs when loading from a UK IP address, and a lot of URLs without /gb/ are being returned when searching google. The benefit I can think of that they are gaining is US pages which are being returned for UK based searches will return the correct content. Are their any other gains to this approach? I'm concerned that if I use this approach for different languages then the radically differing content of othersite.com/red-wigs depending on the location of the crawler might confuse google - also generally changing content depending on IP seems to be recommended against. Thanks
International SEO | | Mickooo0 -
International SEO setup issues canonical URL
My site is www.grocare.com for one region and in.grocare.com for another region. Both of them have the same content except the currency for particular regions. Someone told me that google will take the content as duplicate and not rank either. I have setup hreflang and targeted different regions for both in the search console. I read many article which say canonical urls need to be setup for international seo sites. But Im not sure how to setup canonical urls and whether they are the right way to go . i just don't want my content deranked. Now i have setup hreflang properly after asking the moz community itself. So im hoping to get some help with this query too. TIA
International SEO | | grocare0 -
International SEO question domain.com vs domain.com/us/ , domain.com/uk etc.
Hi Mozzers, I am expanding a website internationally. I own the .com for the domain. I need to accommodate multiple countries and I'm not sure if I should build a folder for /us/ for United States or just have the root domain .com OPTION 1:
International SEO | | jeremycabral
domain.com/page-url -- United States
domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
domain.com/jp/page-url -- Japan OPTION 2:
domain.com/us/page-url -- United States
domain.com/de/page-url -- Denmark
domain.com/jp/page-url -- Japan My concern with option 2 is there will be some dilution and we wouldn't get the full benefit of inbound links compared to Option 1 as we would have geo ip redirection in place to redirect users etc. to the relative sub-folder. Which option is better from an SEO perspective? Cheers, Jeremy0 -
Multiple geographic targeting in Europe
I have a site that is applicable to German speaking people in central europe. If I were to geotarget the site in google webmaster tools to Germany, would that prevent users in Switzerland or Austria seeing the site in their search results.
International SEO | | zeropointlabs0 -
International SEO Question with regards to Sub Folders in Webmaster Tools
So, we have a website in 18 or so different languages. bluewidgets.com/br bluewidgets.com/cn etc I have added each sub folder in Google Webmaster Tools and 'pointed' them to be at their respective geographic specific. However, the United States version of the website is sitting on the root domain. Is there any issue with me pointing the root domain at United States Google, considering there are 18 sub folders already pointed at different regions?
International SEO | | LukeyJamo0 -
Looking for content writers for multi-language SEO
Hi All, I'm currently doing a lot of work for a UK client who has multiple sites outside the UK (all part of the same business). We're currently discussing the option of us handling all of his SEO for his German, French, Spanish and Italian sites too, but we only have access to one person in the office who can speak French and Spanish. They're currently booked up on other jobs that we can't really move them off, so I'm looking for options of outsourcing some of the content writing. My question is, does anyone know of any high quality content writing services that have writers available to write for the countries languages above? We're going to focus initially on their on-site strategy and building up their high quality content. At the moment, they don't have much relevant content on their website, so we're going to initially look at this. Moving forward, we'll be looking at their off-site strategy and trying to find areas to submit high quality articles, look at guest blogging and PR opportunities. Any tips anyone has on this side (in terms of outsourcing to native speakers) would be quite useful too! Many thanks,
International SEO | | PinpointDesigns
Lewis0 -
Does 301 redirect on homepage impact seo strongness of this page
Hi, we are running a multilingual website with this structure : http://www.website.com/en
International SEO | | Samuraiz
http://www.website.com/fr
http://www.website.com/de
http://www.website.com/lang (etc.) with then all onsite URLs this way:
http://www.website.com/en/hello
http://www.website.com/fr/bonjour
http://www.website.com/it/ciao We have a 301 redirect on http://www.website.com going to http://www.website.com/en - except if a user already went on the website and chose a specific language. My question is : Do you think the english homepage will have more seo power if it goes directly to http://www.website.com/ I wonder if we lose some linkjuice with the 301 redirection, as many backlink goes directly to http://www.website.com1 -
Internationalization and SEO
Hi Everyone, This is my first post in this new Q & A section!! This interface looks great!! Now onto the question.... We have www.example.com in English that has 50,000+ URLs. We are in the process of building a new site example.de targeting German users. The German site (www.example.de) will be a mirror of the English site at launch as we want to give a full experience to people visiting the .de domain. However, not all pages will be localized as we can't support that. We are planning on localizing the core sets of pages (~500) and leaving the rest in English. Post launch, we will have additional milestones to localize the remaining pages until the entire site is localized (converted to German). Is this the correct way to go? Will this cause duplicate content issue?
International SEO | | Amjath
Will adding "rel=canonical" tag on these pages solve the purpose? Thanks for the help!0