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Incorrect homepage country variant appearing in search resutls

International SEO

988

coma99 Subscriber last edited by

Hi,

Background

I have an international site with 32 country homepages within the same domain: eg

www.domain.com/en-gb/
www.domain.com/fr-fr/
www.domain.com/de-de/
www.domain.com/es-es/ and so forth

We use IP redirection on the root www.domain.com (which has no HTML page of its own) to divert the user to their relevant country homepage.

Within each country homepage we include:

(a canonical link to itself)

... (hreflang alternates to all instances of other homepages including itself )

Our Google Crawl bot is located in Germany and so when it crawls our root www.domain.com it takes the title and description from its destination url which in crawlbots case is www.domain.com/de-de/ because of the IP redirect.

What is the problem I am trying to solve?

Every variation of local Google results (eg UK/FR/IT/US) displays at the top the crawled root www.domain.com page with German title/description. How can I stop this happening? Surely adding appropriate hrefs and canonicals to every homepage instance is sufficient for Google to display to you your relevant country homepage variant instead!?

Thanks
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