Redirects, 302 and geolocation for multi-regional .com website
-
One of our sites utilizes a single .com domain but offers differentiated article page for users depending on their location.
For example:
example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-gb-en for UK
example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-us-en for US
example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-au-en for Aus
Currently we use example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo as the relative link on the site and then the user is redirected by 302 to the correct article for them based on their location.
I've read countless pages about 302 redirects (and largely why you shouldn't use them because of link juice, indexing etc) but what alternative can we use since we don't want to permanently redirect to one URL but rather redirect to the relevant URL based on the users location.
All the stuff I've read talks about redirecting using 301s but this surely only works when you are redirecting from one URL to one permanent new URL as opposed to redirecting to one of many country specific URLs.
It's not really a solution for us to set up separate TLDs for each country so what is the best mechanism for redirecting user to the correct article for them and making sure that link juice is shared, pages are indexed etc?
I hope I've explained this well enough for any of you to offer advice. Many thanks in advance.
-
Hi Simon,
Setting up a ccTLD is definitely the best approach but it seems like it is anot a solution. How about creating subdomains or subdirectories for each location and use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag and Google Webmaster Tool to Geo-target? The tag and the tool will tell Search Engines that these content are for people in these location in these languages. It should avoid duplicate content and you don't have to use 302 redirect.
Do you think that will be a possible solution for you?
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
-
HSTS Redirects
Hi Are these 307 redirects bad for SEO? They've just popped up on an audit & I haven't seen them before. I'm guessing as they're temporary they should be updated. Thanks Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
Redirecting from _ to - ?
hi everyone, I need your help! 🙂 What's the best way to redirect a lot of urls from sign _ to sign - ? We changed our e-shop CMS and we don't use that _ anymore. We have more than 100.000 URLs and you can imagine that we don't to do by hand. Any chance of doing it with .htaccess easily? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva0 -
Random post plugin creates 302 redirects. What should I do?
Just started work on a great MMA news site. In their footer, they have a plugin for random posts, which creates URL strings with '?random=1' on the end and then 302 redirects to a random article on the site. I know SEO-friendly protocol for redirects is to use 301 and not any of the other 300's. However, I don't really see the need to do 301s for these because of the fact that they are random! That said, I also don't want to leave 1000s of errors that can hinder the 'crawlability' (don't judge me - that's a word :)) of my client's site. My thought right now is to noindex the urls with the '?random=1' in the string, so the spider doesn't worry about crawling those links. Not sure if that is proper code, but it seems that would be quick and effective. Is there a better way to attack this? If you know, please share with me! WP publishers who use random post plugins: have you experienced this? How did you fix it within the friendly confines of Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
Index process multi language website for different countries
We are in charge of a website with 7 languages for 16 countries. There are only slight content differences by countries (google.de | google.co.uk). The website is set-up with the correct language & country annotation e.g. de/DE/ | de/CH/ | en/GB/ | en/IE. All unwanted annotations are blocked by robots.txt. The «hreflang alternate» are also set. The objective is, to make the website visible in local search engines. Therefore we have submitted a overview sitemap connected with a sitemap per country. The sitemap has been submitted now for quite a while, but Google has indexed only 10 % of the content. We are looking for suggestion to boost the index process.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imsi0 -
How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>
Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids0 -
Are links safe from friendsite.com?
I have just checked my backlinks in Majestic and was shocked. It appears I've gained 1500 back links in 1 day all from the domains friendsite.com. I checked a few of the links and the links to my site have disappeared. Looking at friendsite.com, it seems that peopel can bookmark a site, and when they do it appears on the "latest bookmerk" section which is site wide. So my concern is that: 1500 links have appeared in one day from one domain 1500 links disappeared the next day Wouldnt both of these cause Google to get suspicious? What should I do? Should I ask friendsite.com to remove the links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters1 -
Questions about 301 Redirects
I have about 10 - 15 URLs that are redirecting to http://www.domainname.comwww.domainname.com/. (which is an invalid URL)The website is on a Joomla platform. Does anyone know how I can fix this? I can't figure out where the problem is coming from.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnParker27920