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
-
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 -
Soft Launch App with Country Targeting To Match?
Hi,
International SEO | | eTinaRose
We're gearing up to do a soft launch of our app in a few countries, such as Australia. Our website says to request early access since the app is not yet publicly available in the apple store. However, it will be in those soft launch countries. This is what I'm considering... Creating a subdomain site such as au.liquidtext.net (liquidtext.au is not available). And setting that site, au.liquidtext.net, to be country targeted to Australia via webmaster tools. Once the app is available internationally, and the main site has been updated to show this, I would then redirect any subdomains to the main site. Thoughts? Are there any negative repercussions to this this approach that I am not considering? Thank you for your help Moz community!! Tina0 -
Include mobile and international versions of pages to sitemap or not?
My pages already have alternate and hreflang references to point to international and mobile versions of the content. If I add 5 language desktop versions and 5 language mobile versions as https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en explains, my sitemap will get bulky. What are the pros and cons for referencing all page versions in sitemap and for include just general (English/Desktop) version in sitemap?
International SEO | | poiseo0 -
Getting pages that load dynamically into the SE's
SEO'ers, Am dealing with an issue I cannot figure out the best way to handle. Working on a website that shows the definitions of words which are loaded dynamically from an open source. Source such as: wiktionary.org When you visit a particular page to see the definition of the word, say; www.example.com/dictionary/example/ the definition is there. However, how can we get all the definition pages to get indexed in search engines? The WordPress sitemap plugin is not picking up these pages to be added automatically - guess because it's dynamic - but when using a sitemap crawler pages are detected. Can anybody give advice on how to go about getting the 200k+ pages indexed in the SE's? If it helps, here's a reference site that seems to load it's definitions dynamically and has succeeded in getting its pages indexed: http://www.encyclo.nl/begrip/sample
International SEO | | RonFav0 -
Multi-Country Duplicate Content
Hello, We have an ecommerce site that serves several countries on the same .com domain - US, UK and CA. We have duplicate content across these countries because they are all English speaking so there is little variance in the pages and they each sell most of the same products. We have implemented hreflang into our sitemaps but we need to address the duplicate content. We were advised to canonicalize our UK and CA pages back to the duplicate US pages (our US pages account for the majority of our traffic and sales). This would cause the UK and CA pages to fall out of the index but the visitor would still be taken to the correct country's page due to the hreflang. I'm leary about doing this because they are across countries. Is this ok to do? If not, how do we address the duplicate content since they are not on their own CCTLD's?
International SEO | | Colbys0 -
Massive jump in pages indexed (and I do mean massive)
Hello mozzers, I have been working in SEO for a number of years but never seen anything like a jump in pages indexed of this proportion (image is from the Index Status report in Google Webmaster Tools: http://i.imgur.com/79mW6Jl.png Has anyone has ever seen anything like this?
International SEO | | Lina-iWeb
Anyone have an idea about what happened? One thing that sprung to mind might be that the same pages are now getting indexed in several more google country sites (e.g. google.ca, google.co.uk, google.es, google.com.mx) but I don't know if the Index Status report in WMT works like that. A few notes to explain the context: It's an eCommerce website with service pages and around 9 different pages listing products. The site is small - only around 100 pages across three languages 1.5 months ago we migrated from three language subdomains to a single sub-domain with language directories. Before and after the migration I used hreflang tags across the board. We saw about 50% uplift in traffic from unbranded organic terms after the migration (although on day one it was more like +300%), especially from more language diversity. I had an issue where the 'sort' links on the product tables were giving rise to thousands of pages of duplicate content, although I had used the URL parameter handling to communicate to Google that these were not significantly different and only to index the representative URL. About 2 weeks ago I blocked them using the robots.txt (Disallow: *?sort). I never felt these were doing us too much harm in reality although many of them are indexed and can be found with a site:xxx.com search. At the same time as adding *?sort to the robots.txt, I made an hreflang sitemap for each language, and linked to them from an index sitemap and added these to WMT. I added some country specific alternate URLs as well as language just to see if I started getting more traffic from those countries (e.g. xxx.com/es/ for Spanish, xxx.com/es/ for Spain, xxx.xom/es/ for Mexico etc). I dodn't seem to get any benefit from this. Webmaster tools profile is for a URL that is the root domain xxx.com. We have a lot of other subdomains, including a blog that is far bigger than our main site. But looking at the Search Queries report, all the pages listed are on the core website so I don't think it is the blog pages etc. I have seen a couple of good days in terms of unbranded organic search referrals - no spike or drop off but a couple of good days in keeping with recent improvements in these kinds of referrals. We have some software mirror sub domains that are duplicated across two website: xxx.mirror.xxx.com and xxx.mirror.xxx.ca. Many of these don't even have sections and Google seemed to be handling the duplication, always preferring to show the .com URL despite no cross-site canonicals in place. Very interesting, I'm sure you will agree! THANKS FOR READING! 79mW6Jl.png0 -
Working with country specific domain names vs. staying with .com
I've recently inherited a client that has a country specific domain for Canada (.ca) but there is also a US branch for the company at the .com address. They have a direct competitor that operates also in the U.S. and Canada that has decided to operate entirely under the .com address and re-direct all .ca traffic to their .com address. When I compare the link analysis data for both the .ca, .com, and competitors site, I'm finding there is a huge difference between the .ca site and the competitors site, but not a huge difference between the .com site and the competitors site. For example, the domain authorities are as follows: myclient.ca (Canadian branch) - 22 myclient.com (US branch) - 46 competitor.com - 53 When I do a brand search for my client in Canada, the Canadian branch website shows up first, but the American one is second. At this point, would it be better for my client to consolidate the two branches into the .com address and focus on increasing external followed links to the .com website? Or, is there merit in continuing to create a separate inbound link strategy for the .ca site? Thanks.
International SEO | | modernmusings0 -
Improving Search Rankings in other Countries for an existing site
Hello SEOmoz, I have a very well respected international client who ranks high in the US and for English language Google search results worldwide. However, the client's foreign language pages for specific countries do not show up on the first page of SERPs in those specific countries. The foreign nation/language pages are served on the same root domain as the main English language site it this fashion: www.client.com/france www.client.com/brazil Here are my questions: What can we do from an SEO standpoint to improve SERPs in Google.fr or other countries What is the best way to prevent duplicate content errors or prevent the wrong page from being indexed abroad. What are some best practices when using Google Webmaster tools in this regard? Thanks
International SEO | | BPIAnalytics0