Does IP filtering have a negative impact on SEO?
-
If a large site has multiple regions (Australia, USA, UK, France), how will IP filtering to a particular area affect SEO.
e.g: Ilive in the UK an if I visit the said website I would automatically be redirected to the UK subfolder of the site whereas somebody searching in Australia would be redirected to the AUS folder.
Will there be any detrimental affect on SEO and will the search engines still be able to crawl the entire site no matter which data centre is being used?
-
Perfect, thank you both for your help.
-
I do this on most of my sites and haven't seen anything bad happen. In fact a quick trip to Google.fi (just to check) shows mysite.com/fi/ followed by mysite.com (with inline sitelinks) and then mysite.com/fi/page and mysite.com/page, so seems fine.
Other subfolders with less links going into them (Germany for example) have mysite.com and mysite.com/de/
So UK IP directs them to site.com/uk, AUS IP to site.com/aus, yeah?
A couple of considerations.
- Allow users to select what language they want once they're on the site (and make it obvious how to change). To get this to work make sure you check the referral header and if it's from site.com don't impliment the IP redirect.
Having a drop down in the header also means Google can get to all of your language subfolders.
- Set your targeted country in webmaster tools. You can do this for subfolders quite easily.
There should be no problem even with same language (English) content as long as you do this.
A bit of further reading for you
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-info-from-google-and-yahoo-tilts-the-geotargeting-balance
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
If you need any specifics, let me know
-
I would never recommend multiple domains for the same content. it will generate duplicate content and will harm you more then help you.
I think you should do the following, check the IP look it up and then ASK! the user if he/she wants to go to the Australian version or stay at the American version. Or maybe have dynamic content that makes the user aware of the Australian office.
I would personally have all of the TLD's point to different sites with different content. That way you can GEO target, have the sites located localy and use local TLD's all of witch will help you out greatly in your SEO efforts.
Here's to hoping my reply made sense
-
Thanks for your response.
The site currently sits on a .com domain and is split by 8 regions all in English. They are looking to go into non-english speaking countries but not yet.
In Google.com.au when searching for the brand the .com version comes up top with United States next to the URL and the AUS part of the site is below, even though they are geo located. What they are thinking of doing is if they click on the USA link it will check to see if they are in Australia and forward them to the Australian sub-section.
There has been talk about ccTLDs but this would be a massive amount of work and is not currently possible due to the amount of duplicated work that would be involved from their point of view.
I am trying to back up any response that I give ensure the correct path is taken.
Would you recommend not to use IP filtering?
-
actually it will affect SEO in a positive way, since google will notice that the hosting server is located in the region it targets. BUT and there are several:
- You will have unhappy visitors, what if I visited your site while I was travelling in Spain, since I don't understand a word Spanish I wouldn't be a very happy camper.
- Google will only see one of your languages since it has a fixed IP.
The right way to do it:
- have a separate domain name for each country. Eg: Danish target group .dk English UK .co.uk English US .com German .de and so on
- Have a well written (translated by a translator not google translate) version for each language
- Give the visitor the opportunity to select the language he/she want to read, don't force them, guide them.
- have your different languages hosted in the target areas.
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
-
International SEO - UK & US
Hi! I'm currently working with a brand that is well established in the UK and is looking to expand it's reach in US. The UK site has a solid link profile and I think that creating a sub-folder for the US site is by far the best solution. My only concern is that the UK site uses a .co.uk domain. Would it therefore be counter-productive to use a subfolder that looks like this: www.example.co.uk/us In an ideal world I would advise the brand to acquire a location neutral domain (e.g. www.example.com) however the [brandname].com isn't available and options are otherwise very limited! Steps would be taken to ensure all other technical bases are covered (hreflang tags etc) but I'm struggling to find any further insight on this issue. Any feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks, Harrison
International SEO | | harrycox0 -
Setting up I.P Filter Google Analytics - I.p ending with 0/24
Hi everyone, Your help would be much appreciated for the following: I am trying to setup I.P filters for our Google Analytic account to exclude internal traffic. We are located in multiple locations and each location have multiple I.p addresses. The I.P addresses we have end either by 0/24 which apparently means they provide a range from 0 to 255 and or 128/25. I have tried to setup the I.P addresses in different formats on the GA filter but they are apparently are not valid: example of one setup I tried: 1**.\2**.\8*.([0-256]) I have gone through the Filter setup guide from Google but I must be doing something wrong- probably to do on how I setup the I.P's ending with 0/24 and 128/25 If anyone could help me on how I can set up the I.P filters Google analytic would be great. The I.P addresses look like the following (changed digits): Location 1: 174.177.179.0/25 174.177.179.128/25 Location 2: 196.222.87.0/24
International SEO | | AlphaDigital2
194.59.197.0/24 Thanks you so much for your help, L.0 -
International SEO
Anyone have any good free resources for international SEO best practices? I've read through most of the common stuff and wondered if there's anything I'm missing. We are getting ready to launch a version of our website in the UK and I could use any hints or advice that could make my life easier. My biggest question is whether to keep the sites as 1 site (single domain with sub-folder for sharing incoming link profile) or to get a .UK domain and do everything from scratch. (it seems like a sub-domain is not the way to go?). I also wonder if any of you can share things to look out for, pitfalls, mistakes, etc...? TIA for any help/answers!
International SEO | | DownPour0 -
Country-specific SEO
Hi, my client offers courses that whilst based in Manchester, England are mainly attended by people in countries such as Georgia, Libya and Nigeria etc. The people that attend the courses are fluent in English. We're looking at performing country-specific SEO and I have a few queries. The plan so far: Obtain TLD's in each target country. These TLD's would be hosted on the same server as the core site based in England. Option 1: Each TLD would be a microsite with content specific to the country including geo-signals, in English. Option 2: Each TLD would 301 redirect to the core site, i.e. example.sa redirects to example.com/sa/ and this country-specific section would have relevant geo-signals. So I have 3 questions at this point: 1. Most-all of the tips I have seen about country-specific SEO assume that the content should be translated to the native tongue although in this case, the audience are fluent English speaks. Does this make a difference? Is it okay to use English and still be able to rank in country-specific search engines? 2. Between options 1 & option 2 - which would be the optimum setup? 3. Last question, if we obtain the TLD's I hear that it's not necessary to also host that TLD in the target country, is this right? Thanks.
International SEO | | lokito0 -
Can geographic location of web server affect in SEO?
I have server in Singapore. I need to target USA and Europe for my site. Whether I need to change server? Please guide me... Can geographic location of web server affect in SEO? If Yes, how it affect in SEO?
International SEO | | MayurChavda0 -
SEO and Cloud Hosting
Hello, Cant find any clear answers on my issue and hope someone can help. Rather than being worried about losing local rankings with a move to the cloud, we have the opposite issue. The site is a large, international reference site with millions of visits a month. We have the site on servers hosting in UK, Europe and US. If we move the site to Amazon cloud hosting (obvious benefits aside), is there a danger of losing rankings internationally (depending on where the cloud datacentre is located)? Are their any other possible pitfalls and counters? Would be grateful for some advice on this. Thanks
International SEO | | LoweProfero-AU0 -
Pop-up to select country. Any negative SEO effect?
Hi there! We have similar websites in different countries (it's an ecommerce site). Some times, those websites share the same language and, for example, people from Mexico end up in a page from our website in Argentina. Therefore they see our products in their language buy in a foreign currency. We would like to show them a pop-up (like a shadowbox) depending on their IP to allow them to go to their local website. There wouldn't be any redirect. Would that affect our rankings in any way? Would Googlebots see that as well? Thanks!
International SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
International SEO - auto geo-targetting
I read with interest the recent post on international SEO and the top level domain architecture approaches to local content: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview#jtc135670 The issue I have is a little more complex: The business sells a wide variety of products (37) but one is by far and away the biggest and most popular. This means that due to the link profile of the various country sites and HQ site, search engines categorise the site according to this product (this is easily seen with the Google Adplanner) and the other product lines suffer as a result. The current architecture is to have a .com site and then individual ccTLD country sites, again with all products on each site. This creates an issue as in most countries the brand is not strong (compared to the keyword names and search volumes of the products) and so it is not that effective in generating organic traffic. The .com hogs much of the inbound links and the country sites themselves are not that well optimised for a number of reasons. A proposed solution has been to leverage the strength of the .com and the search volume for the product names, and to produce thematic sites based on each product: productA.brand.com
International SEO | | StevieCC
productB.brand.com
productC.brand.com In this way, the sites, content and link profiles are aligned around the more desirable products and we can expect improved organic search performance as a result (or at least ensure relevant traffic finds the relevant content fast). In terms of providing localised content, the plan was to use content mirroring and to then assign each content mirror to a specific geo-location using the webmaster tools console (and other SE equivilents). This is shown I think in one of Rand's videos. ProductA.brand.com/de/de Germany site for product A with unique German content
ProductA.brand.com/fr/fr French site for product A with unique French content This makes economic sense to me as to utilise the ccTLDs would result in hundreds of separate sites with all the licence and server considerations that entails. For example, for product A alone we would have to produce: productA.brand.de
productA.brand.fr
productA.brand.cn
productA.brand.jp
ect ect ect This just would not be sustainable in license/server costs alone across 37 products and 24 countries. However, I saw in a recent presentation at SES London that (auto) geo-targeting is risky, often doesn't work well for SEO and can even be seen as cloaking. I think the above strategy could still work, but perhaps we should avoid the use of auto-geotargetting altogether and hope the search engines alone do their job in getting users to the right content as we optimise the unique content for each country (and if they don't, ensure our desgn, UX and country selectors do the job instead). SEO guru consensus is to use the ccTLD if you own it, but as described above, in the real world that just isn't possible or practical given the company's strategic position. Which leads to the final question- we do own the brand ccTLDs- if they are directed back to the content mirror for the country on the .com, is there any SEO benefit in doing so aside from directing back any link juice associated with the domain)?0