Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. International SEO
    4. What countries does Google crawl from? Is it only US or do they crawl from Europe and Asia, etc.?

    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.

    What countries does Google crawl from? Is it only US or do they crawl from Europe and Asia, etc.?

    International SEO
    5
    6
    8694
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Envoke-Marketing
      Envoke-Marketing last edited by

      Where does Google crawl the web from? Is it in the US only, or do they do it from a European base too? The reason for asking is for GeoIP redirection. For example, if a website is using GeoIP redirection to redirect all US traffic to a .com site and all EU traffic to a .co.uk site, will Google ever see the .co.uk site?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
      • Hannah_Smith
        Hannah_Smith last edited by

        Hi Keith,

        In my experience Google mainly crawls from the US.

        You're quite right, GeoIP redirection can cause major issues with indexation - as if you're redirecting everything from the US to the .com googlebot can't see the .co.uk site.

        As such, I'm not a fan. Rather than implementing a hard redirect I prefer Amazon's approach. If you visit the amazon.com site from a UK IP you get a javascript overlay that invites you to visit the .co.uk version of the site instead - they let the user decide which site to view rather than actually redirecting them.

        This is a nice solution as it ensures that the search bots can crawl both versions of the site, and rankings aren't endangered.

        I hope this helps,

        Hannah

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
        • FXDD
          FXDD last edited by

          Keith, I am having the same issue and I agree with you. The fact that Google has data centers in Europe does not necessarily mean the algos are indexing from there. I also want to set Europe and US GeoIP redirection. It would be great to get Mozers opinions on this.  Hopefully this post gets freshly reviewed

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • WendyWuTours
            WendyWuTours Subscriber @Envoke-Marketing last edited by

            Interesting question - I'd quite like to know what happens here too.

            Matt Cutts recently posted a video on cloaking (http://youtu.be/QHtnfOgp65Q) saying that as long as you don't do anything 'special' for Googlebot you're OK, but presumably if you are redirecting IP's based on location and you don't want to prevent Googlebot form accessing your site then effectively you have to do something 'special' for Googlebot (e.g. you're doing one thing for everyone else and a different thing for Googlebot).

            QHtnfOgp65Q

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Envoke-Marketing
              Envoke-Marketing @Gyorgy last edited by

              Hi,

              The data center locations is interesting, but it isn't what I was looking for. I need to know whether Google crawls the web from any IP other than US IPs.

              To clear up the second question, let me be more specific:

              Let's say Google is crawling a .co.uk site from a US IP address. The site is using GEO IP redirection to redirect all US traffic to the .com site. Therefore, when Google attempts to crawl the .co.uk from the US IP address site it will be redirected to the .com site, never seeing the .co.uk site. Can anyone confirm that this is what happens?

              WendyWuTours 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Gyorgy
                Gyorgy last edited by

                I found an article from 2008 that shows Google data centre locations: http://bit.ly/mONhf9

                Your other question is a bit confusing. Why Google wouldn't see the UK site?

                Envoke-Marketing 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • Cleber009

                  Problem to get multilingual posts indexed on Google

                  Last year on June I decided to make my site multi-lingual. The domain is: https://www.dailyblogprofits.com/ The main language English and I added Portuguese and a few posts on Spanish. What happened since then? I started losing traffic from Google and posts on Portuguese are not being indexed. I use WPML plugin to make it multi-lingual and I had Yoast installed. This week I uninstalled Yoast and when I type on google "site:site:dailyblogprofits.com/pt-br" I started seeing Google indexing images, but still not the missing posts. I have around 145 posts on Portuguese, but on Search Console it show only 57 hreflang tags. Any idea what is the problem? I'm willing to pay for an SEO Expert to resolve this problem to me.

                  International SEO | | Cleber009
                  0
                • Atalig2

                  How to Localise per Region (Europe, America, APAC, EMEI) and not per country as best SEO practise?

                  Hi SEO expertises! I am currently working with a client that initially have an English website targeting UK users but want to expand their market into four new regions (Europe, America, APAC and EMEI) keeping English as a main language. I would like to request your help here as I told the client ISO location and hreflang it will be just possible per language and they must need to localise each English region with local keywords, however I would like to double check if it will be any way (Sitemap, Hreflang) we can tell Google we are targeting per region and not per country? Thanks a lot!

                  International SEO | | Atalig2
                  0
                • Bee159

                  Which Google does a .ie website get shown in?

                  Hi all, I am working on a .ie website and I was under the understanding that if you have a regional domain, like .ie you will limited to being shown in a search engine like google.ie When I go to International Targeting in Google SEarch Console it says the site is associated with: Ireland Am I limiting my ability to rank well in worldwide Google searches with this domain and if so, how can I counter this? Many thanks.

                  International SEO | | Bee159
                  0
                • Netleaf.ca

                  Worldwide and Europe hreflang implementation.

                  Hi Moz ! We're having quite a discussion here and I'd like to have some inputs. Let me explain the situation and what we plan to do so far. One of our client has two separate markets : World and Europe. Both pages versions will be mostly the same, except for the fact that they will have their own products. So basically, we'd want to show only the European EN version to Europe and the standard EN version to the rest of the world, same goes for FR and ES. As far as IT, DE, CS and SK, they will only be present within the european version. Since we cannot target all Europe with a single hreflang tag, we might have to do it for every single european countries. Regarding this subject, SMX Munich recently had quite an interesting session about this topic with a confirmation coming from John Mueller saying that we can target a single URL more than once with different hreflang tags. You can read more here : http://www.rebelytics.com/multiple-hreflang-tags-one-url/ So having all this in mind, here's the implementation we plan to do : www.example.com/en/ Self canonical www.example.com/fr/ - hreflang = fr www.example.com/es/ - hreflang = es www.example.eu/it/ - hreflang = it www.example.eu/de/ - hreflang = de www.example.eu/cs/ - hreflang = cs www.example.eu/sk/ - hreflang = sk www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = be-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = ch-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = cz-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = de-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = es-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = fr-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = uk-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = gr-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = hr-fr etc… . This will be done for all european countries (FR, EN and ES). www.example.com/en/ - x-default Let me know what you guys think. Thanks!

                  International SEO | | Netleaf.ca
                  0
                • AmitTulsiyani

                  How can I restrict the domains country by country?

                  Hello, I have Two Domains one is xyz.co.uk and other is xyz.com Now, my main target for .com is United States, and I don't want to open that .com domain in any other country especially India. The same with the .co.uk, I dont want to open .co.uk in other countries. I did it with some developer help but it gave me redirected error in Google Webmaster. Can anyone please guide me how I can do this the proper way ? And Other issues is, how can I implement ,if any user in United States open xyz.co.uk than he should redirect to the .com version. Thank you.

                  International SEO | | AmitTulsiyani
                  0
                • Ben.JD

                  If I redirect based on IP will Google still crawl my international sites if I implement Hreflang

                  We are setting up several international sites. Ideally, we wouldn't set up any redirects, but if we have to (for merchandising reasons etc) I'd like to assess what the next best option would be. A secondary option could be that we implement the redirects based on IP. However, Google then wouldn't be able to access the content for all the international sites (we're setting up 6 in total) and would only index the .com site. I'm wondering whether the Hreflang annotations would still allow Google to find the International sites? If not, that's a lot of content we are not fully benefiting from. Another option could be that we treat the Googlebot user agent differently, but this would probably be considered as cloaking by the G-Man. If there are any other options, please let me know.

                  International SEO | | Ben.JD
                  0
                • david.smith.segarra

                  Does Google's algorithm work the same in every country?

                  I can't help but feel this is a silly question! but does Google algorithm work exactly the same throughout all countries? I run a few sites in the UK and a couple in Spain but can't help but feel that my Spanish sites are harder to rank for. The sites that rank the best are business directories in Spain... whereas here in the UK you'd be lucky to find one on page one..

                  International SEO | | david.smith.segarra
                  0
                • A_Q

                  Subdomain hosted in a different country - what are the implications?

                  Hello, We are looking at creating an eCommerce section to a website and we are just weighing up the options: Magento - host on hour own server - great but it can often be very slow when hosting a shared server. Shopify - hosted solution but hosting is in the US and we are in the UK and shop will be hosted on a subdomain as a result Build our own solution - time consuming and costly There are two issues that have arisen from this situation.... Is it worse for SEO to host your store in a different country or to host in your country but your store potentially run slower? I'm swaying to the side of the argument that says give your users a good and fast experience instead of worrying about where you host the store. Bearing in mind that the main website will be hosted in the UK anyway and it is just the subdomain that will be hosted in the US. Just wondered if anybody has had experience with this or if I'm missing something? All feedback greatly appreciated! Thanks, Elias

                  International SEO | | A_Q
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.