What is the best way to make country specific IP redirect for only product pricng pages?
-
My website has 3 services and its price will be different for US/EU/Developed world and Asian/African countries.Apart from pricing page, all other things remain same.
I want to use IP based redirect .I heard this thing is called cloaking and used by black-hat guys.
What kind of instructions should I give to my web developer to look best to Google/Search bots and correctly show visitors the intended prices.Is there any caution to be taken care of.
Thanks for your time
-
Points noted.
I am targeting users continent wise.
1)North America
2)Europe,Australia
3)Rest
Hopefully,that will reduce the border overlap problem.(?) I do not mind 1 and 2 be mixed just 3 has to be separate due to my business model and vast Purchasing power parity difference.
Will the error be less than 10-15% seeing the above conditions? Any best practices to minimize?
I appreciate your time,Ryan.
-
In my opinion, you absolutely must offer visitors the ability to manually select their country. I do everything possible to avoid legal contracts, but if a client requested country-based content and refused to allow users to manually change their country I would either refuse to accommodate the request, or would have a legal disclaimer written up. The disclaimer would read something similar to:
"I have requested a change be made to my site which is against the advice of my consultant and the best practices of the SEO industry. I have been advised this change will lead to a negative user experience which will impact my sales and other statistical measurements of my site. "
The issue is however the geo-location is created, there is a 100% guarantee to be errors. There are people and companies who live near borders and otherwise choose ISPs or IPs from other countries. There are also people living, working and visiting other countries. You are forcing these people to view information in a format they do not desire and may not understand.
10-15 years ago, many people felt stuck with the options available on the internet. Those days are long gone. If your website is not presented in a very easy to do business with manner, you will turn buyers into visitors who bounce off your site and go to competitors.
-
Thanks for the answer.
I do not want average users to know what price is offered at other country .Though, somebody going via proxy can know .But,that is not an issue! So,country selection is not an option for me!
I have seen some websites making errors on detecting my country.How to minimize such errors?Is it that difficult for assigning country from IP technically?
-
You might also serve the exact same page to everyone but read the environment variables of the inbound visitor to determine which prices to show.
Or... serve same page to everyone and simply have a dropdown menu or radio buttons for the visitor to select proper pricing.
One problem that you will have is... some people from country A will be buying the service for a location in country B. Lots of transactions on US websites are made by people who are working in or visiting other countries. You might be surprised at how often this happens.
-
Cloaking is defined as presenting different content to search engines then you do to other visitors. Cloaking is an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings and is indeed a black hat practice.
Geographic redirects is a perfectly legitimate practice whereby you wish to show users from specific countries content which has been localized. The localization includes not only currencies but language, units of measurement and cultural references.
Some suggestions for your localized pages:
-
separate content based on country, not language. For example the USA and UK both speak English, but they each use different dialects, currencies and measurements. Depending on what products or services you are offering, you may need to update more then just the pricing.
-
keep the pages on the same domain but use folders to separate country-specific content
-
use the language meta tag on each localized page to indicate it's target
-
offer a method for visitors to change their country manually. I recommend small images of each country's flag. They are very recognizable and understandable.
-
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
-
I am based in the UK. I want to appeal to a UK and US market. One of my keywords is 'generalised' which gets way more traffic in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do?
Hi folks. I am based in the UK. I am about to launch a new blog, and I want to appeal to the UK and US markets. One of my primary keywords is 'generalised', which gets way more traffic (as seen using Moz's keyword tool) in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do? Any guidance would be great. I note this has been discussed before, but seemingly without a conclusion. I would really appreciate any help you can provide.
International SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
What is best practice of using google translate
Hi, I'm thinking of adding google translate to our retailing site so that we could reach more international customers. what about the pros&cons? Any experience of success of utilising it and what potential issues should I be looking at? Thanks
International SEO | | LauraHT0 -
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
International SEO | | bjs20100 -
Subdomains or subfolders for language specific sites?
We're launching an .org.hk site with English and Traditional Chinese variants. As the local population speaks both languages we would prefer not to have separate domains and are deciding between subdomains and subfolders. We're aware of the reasons behind generally preferring folders, but many people, including moz.com, suggest preferring subfolders to subdomains with the notable exception of language-specific sites. Does this mean subdomains should be preferred for language specific sites, or just that they are okay? I can't find any rationale to this other than administrative simplification (e.g. easier to set up different analytics / hosting), which in our case is not an issue. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
International SEO | | SOS_Children0 -
Country Specific Google Results
Does anyone have any stats (preferred) on users selecting Google results segmented to their country? For instance, users in the UK (France, Japan, etc.) selecting the "Pages from the UK" option to limit results to country based sites? Or if not hard stats, at least any international users care to comment? Cheers, Brian ~identity
International SEO | | identity0 -
Ranking well internationally, usage of hreflang, duplicate country content
I'm trying to wrap my head around various options when it comes to international SEO, specifically how to rank well in countries that share a language, and the risk of duplicate content in these cases. We have a chance to start from scratch because we're switching to a new e-commerce platform, and we were looking into using hreflang. Let's assume an example of a .com webshop that targets both Austria and Germany. One option is to include both language and region in the URL, and mark these as such using hreflang: webshop.com/de-de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
webshop.com/de-at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Another option would be to only include the language in the URL, not the region, and let Google figure out the rest: webshop.com/de/german-language-content (with hreflang de) Which would be better? The risk of inserting a country, of course, is that you're introducing duplicate content, especially since for webshops there are usually only minor differences in content (pricing, currency, a word here and there). If hreflang is an effective means to make sure that visitors from each country get the correct URL from the search engines, I don't see any reason not to use this way. But if search engines get it wrong, users will end up in the wrong page and will have to switch country, which could result in conversion loss. Also, if you only use language in the URL, is it useful at all to use hreflang? Aren't engines perfectly able to recognize language already? I don't mention ccTLDs here because most of the time we're required to use a .com domain owned by our customer. But if we did, would that be much better? And would it still be useful to use hreflang then? webshop.de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
webshop.at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Michel Hendriks
Docdata Commerce0 -
Should I include language specific characters in the URL?
So a client's site is to be set up like this: domain.com
International SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey
domain.co.uk
domain.de
domain.fr
domain.pl The question is, on the non english language sites, which would be more likely to rank? domain.de/über or domain.de/ueber Thanks!0 -
How do you see Google results specific to location?
We run a Canadian website and are interested in seeing what SERPs look like from specific postal codes. Is there any way to manipulate Google to think our IP address comes from another location? Thanks!
International SEO | | ClaytonKendall0