IP redirect possible SEO issues?
-
Hi
I help manage a small eCommerce business that sells worldwide. We currently have 4 stores
www.tidy-books.com (US site)
www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK)
www.tidy-books.eu (EU)
We have auto redirect based on the country of your IP.
The .com is the route address though.
Currently I have decided to focus all my energies with link building etc on .com as it seems to carry the most weight and being a very small team we don't have the resources for separate campaigns for all websites at the moment. Whilst I've done on site SEO with country in mind i.e for US kids instead of children.
I'm just wondering if you can see any pitfalls in this approach, Ideally I would like to have a team focus on each store separately and have them as separate domains but with the IP redirect we at least rank well in Google for the .com and the customers gets sent to the relevant store.
Any thoughts would be great
-
You're welcome Geraldine, hope this solves your doubts. If after speaking with the devs you'll still have some doubts, you know where we are and if you don't find us there's an huge great community of professionals here! Cheers!
-
Hi thanks for all the support this is something I will have to look into with our web developers really appreciate the advice and guidance.
-
Hey Gianluca! thanks for your endorsement. From a geolocalization expert like you is even more gratificant
@Geraldine. Gianluca's last advice is a very good option for your .EU TLD, because normally it doesn't make much sense here in europe due to the high difference we have in such a small space.
In that way you can use that version as the default one and localize your offers for each country. Google normally rewards people using their new standards
-
Hi Geraldine,
the answer given by mememax is correct.
I would add something that I don't really like: tidy.books.eu is not really a great way for targeting the European Countries... because it is not really a ccTLD. It is like the .asia termination, offcially to show the european nature of a site, but it doesn't have any geotargeting power within Europe, as a .co.uk domain name may have in google.co.uk
More over, you can geotarget Europe in GWT.
So, my suggestion is to implement the very new rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" mark up, combined with the more classic rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" one.
That mark-up is telling google that the URLs with it is not targeting any specific language or country, and should be used to be shown in the SERPs to all those users who are targeted by your other sites.
That way your .eu site will be shown in all the European Googles but the .co.uk one (also if they are in another language - i.e.: Spanish - but with the common currency: Euro).
<rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.tidy-books.eu"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-UK" href="http://www.tidy-books.co.uk"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="http://www.tidy-books.com"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" hreflang="en-AU" href="http://www.tidy-books.com.au"></rel="alternate">
The only "problem" with this solution is that users from countries you are not targeting with a country targeting site will always see the .eu domain.
-
IP redirect may be tricky since you'll have to maintain that information up to date and be sure that it is working properly. Also there may be users who even staying in a uk ip wants to see the american or eu site, and having the possibility of using the hreflang to set up correctly every site I'll change that strategy to:
- instead of redirecting via IP, I'll consider using that info to show a banner which states, "hey we've seen you're in UK, click here to see the uk version of the site, you'll find many offer based on your country!" (or maybe something shorter than this
- use the hreflang tag to specify to engines which language is optimized for each site, in that way google won't give you duplicate content issues and it will also make the right site ranking depending on the country.
In the short time I'll also give more focus on the .com site because it ahs the widest audience and because it's the most common TLD used for commercial sites. However in the long term you may want to have specialized teams which will make this differences even stronger with an highly focused marketing activity.
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
-
Redirects
Hello, i would like to ask which is the best redirect to use in a website now i have all my links to go to https://www.anavasis.gr Which is the best between: https://www.anavasis.gr https://anavasis.gr https://www.anavasis.gr/index.php https://anavasis.gr/index.php thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | anavasis0 -
Redirects - How Best to do this ?
Hi I am looking to close Website A which has many pages. I would like to keep the home page and add some great content to it with a link pointing to Website B. As for all the other pages excluding the home page , how is it best to approach them on Website A. Should I redirect them all to the home page of Website A which will tell Google thoose Pages are no longer needed and to prevent the visitors from seeing a 404? My Main aim here is to not lose any visitors to Website A by sending them to Website B but also to hopefully pass any Page strength from Website A to Website B Thanks Adam
Technical SEO | | AMG1000 -
Website redirects
We consolidated websites. All the international sites have been brought under the roof of our mothership site based in the US: www.crisisprevention.com ... We mapped out all of the URLs and where they should be redirected. However, if someone types in, say, www.crisisprevention.co.uk it redirects to the mothership site, BUT the old URL hangs around no matter what page you navigate to. I feel like it has duplicate content ramifications or worse. I would like opinions on this, so I can take my findings to IT and figure out a solution. Here’s another example: http://www.positive-options.co.uk and another http://www.positive-options.com
Technical SEO | | spackle0 -
Questions about Redirects
Hi, I am trying to make sure that I can determine if a site has a 301 redirect set up to redirect the site from domain.com to www.domain.com and am hoping that you can confirm the following for me, or let me know if I am off track: is http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ a reliable way to check if a 301 redirect is set up? is Screaming Frog SEO Spider a good tool to use to see if a redirect is in place? if I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com, I should only get results for the site being indexed, not for the site that has the 301 redirect set up, right? For example, if www.domain.com is set up to redirect to domain.com, then I should get no search results for site:www.domain.com and only show indexed pages for domain.com. If I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com and get results for both, then does this mean that the redirect is not set up? if a redirect is set up from www.domain.com to domain.com, should the crawl report should only show one page crawled on www.domain.com? if a crawl report shows same number of pages for www.domain.com as for domain.com, does that mean that redirect is not set up properly? Thanks in advance for your help! Carolina
Technical SEO | | csmm0 -
301 Redirect
The SEOmoz crawl campaign found some 404 errors in my Joomla site poker-brands.ca. So, I figured I would set up 301 redirects in my hosting account to make sure bots don't read that there is a page missing. For example: This link gave a 404 error in the crawl: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager I redirected it to: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pt3-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager-hem-hm2 However, when I visit the first link it doesn't send me to the second link. Am I supposed to get forwarded to the second link now?
Technical SEO | | Uramark0 -
Redirecting According to the occasion
We have loads of different departments that relate to specific occasions (e.g. Christmas, mothers day, father day etc), they all have good PR and inbound links etc and most of them rank well for the specific occasion. What I was thinking is that I could redirect all of the occasions that aren’t in use and send the traffic to the valid occasion live at the moment. So I would 301 all the Christmas pages to our valentine’s day main page. Then once valentines is gone I will redirect Christmas and valentines to the mothers day main page and so on. So this would be constantly switching as different occasions come along. Can you see any possible negative problems? Is there any chance that if I redirect Christmas for example, and then when Christmas comes we remove the redirect, could it harm the Christmas page?
Technical SEO | | steliosp210 -
Redirect question
I would like to redirect http://example.com/index.html to http://www.example.com/ Is the code below correct ? RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}^example.comRewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Google Webmaster redirect vs 301 redirect
OK assuming a client's website has the right tracking script (hopefully analytics isn't effected by this issue), ... what happens if the htaccess file has a 301 redirect to the www-address, but within Google Webmaster Tools, the address chosen to crawl by Google is the non-www address? How will Google handle and which address takes precedence in this situation? _Cindy
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar0