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    4. Geo-Redirect: good idea or not?

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    Geo-Redirect: good idea or not?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • WeAreDigital_BE
      WeAreDigital_BE Subscriber last edited by

      Hi Mozzers,

      The background:

      I have this very corporate .com domain which is used worldwide. Next to that, we have another .com domain which is specifically created for the US visitors. Within the organic rankings, we notice that our corporate domain is ranking much better in the US. Many visitors are arriving on this domain. As it is a corporate domain being used worldwide, they get lost.

      My questions:

      I know there are ways to redirect by location. Would it be smart to automatically redirect US visitors for the corporate domain to the commercial US-specific domain? Is it possible to only redirect US visitors and leave the website as it is for visitors from other countries. Won't this harm the corporate website (organically) worldwide?

      If this would be a good idea, any recommended plugins or concrete procedures?

      Thank you so much for helping me out!
      Sander

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • WeAreDigital_BE
        WeAreDigital_BE Subscriber @DirkC last edited by

        Thank you for your answer Dirk. This looks really solid.

        Sander

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • DirkC
          DirkC last edited by

          Hi Sander

          Redirecting based on ip address can be quite tricky. If you would redirect US visitors based on ip address to the US site rather than the corporate site you risk that you will redirect the main Googlebot (who is crawling your site with a Californian ip) to the US site as well. You could exclude the Google ip's from the redirection - but that would be against the Google Guidelines (check http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2008/06/how-google-defines-ip-delivery.html : "Googlebot should see the same content a typical user from the same IP address would see.")

          You could consider to use the ip detection to show a message to US visitors - inviting them to visit the US site rather than the corporate one. This way you give the choice to the user - continue the visit on the corporate site or going to the dedicated US version (which is probably better in terms of usability as well - personally I always find it annoying when a site redirects me somewhere based on my location). For frequent visitors you could store their choice in a cookie & redirect them automatically if the cookie is set for this particular visitor)

          Hope this helps,

          Dirk

          WeAreDigital_BE 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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