How to test a geo tagged homepage?
-
The e-commerance system we have has a geo tagged hompage system so you can set up different homepages based on the user country IP. But I want to test what the default homepage is, if the system can not get the user IP, does anyone know of a way to do this?
Also does googles bot, not give an IP for this, or is it always an American IP (even if your site is set to a different country)?
Thanks
-
Unfortunately it seems that the e-commerce (which is closed sourced) is built around this geo IP location system.
When I checked the cached version of the site it was indeed the American version, which was just the default simple version of the homepage (no keyword text)
I then google searched stings of texts from our UK / Irish homepages, and no results found
So I then created an American version of the homepage (just a dup of the uk/irish homepages)
A week later did my search test, and got a hit.
Now we are starting to rank for a few more keywords on the homepage
-
I do not recommend redirecting people to different content based on IP. Googlebot may change IP addresses but it's always from the US. This makes it impossible for Googlebot to see any of your international content. You can use the IP address to ask the user if they want to set their settings to a different country and be placed there every time, but do not assume.
-
There are many proxy services out there so you can do Geo Testing. Basically they have a server in that country and using their settings you funnel your requests through that server and it's just like you were in that country. I know there's Wonder Proxy and I'm sure you could find others.
-
I'm not sure about the 'testing tool' thing, but Google says that Googlebot's IP Address changes from 'time to time' but that same explanation says you can look in your website's logs and do a reverse DNS lookup.
In terms of a 'default' page... in my opinion you should ensure you have a standard (unmodified/non-redirected) home page. So if your primary market is the USA then that's the default and then only redirect non-US based folk. That way you determine the default home page and aren't reliant on Googlebot's IP (or any other crawler's for that matter).
Hope this helps.
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 have a Category and Tag In My Blogs
I have use category and Tags in my blogs. Now i have an problem with blog URL and Tags URL. My blog URLs is also show in Tags page and both the content is same. For Example: My Blog URL is: https://www.example.com/advice-how-to-do-batting And Tag Page URL is : https://www.example.com/advice-batting in that - https://www.example.com/advice-how-to-do-batting The URLs contain same content. No should i write two different meta title and description for above two URLs pages. As there might more blog added under Tags pages with different topics and title. Request on Thought Please.
Technical SEO | | ProcessSEO0 -
Duplicate title while setting canonical tag.
Hi Moz Fan, My websites - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/ has run financial service, So our main keywords is about "Insurance" in Thai, But today I have an issues regarding to carnonical tag. We have a link that containing by https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance?showForm=1&brand_id=9&model_id=18&car_submodel_id=30&ci_source_id=rabbit.co.th&car_year=2014 and setting canonical to this url - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance within 5,000 items. But in this case I have an warning by site audit tools as Duplicate Page Title (Canonical), So is that possible to drop our ranking. What should we do, setting No-Index, No-Follow for all URL that begin with ? or keep them like that.
Technical SEO | | ASKHANUMANTHAILAND0 -
Canonical homepage link uses trailing slash while default homepage uses no trailing slash, will this be an issue?
Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Same H1 & H2 Tags
Is it bad to have the same H1 & H2 tag on one page? I found a similar question here on the moz forum but it didn't exactly answer my question. And will adding "about" on the H2 help, or should we avoid duplicate tags completely? Here is a link to the page in question (which will repeat throughout this site.) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Canonical Tags on Parameter Pages With Hreflang
Hey Everyone: We are currently implementing hreflang tags on our site, and we have many parameter pages with hreflang tags; however, I am afraid these may be counted as duplicate content without canonical tags. example.com/utm_source=tpi href='http://example.com/de" hreflang="de" rel="alternate" href='http://example.com/nl" hreflang="nl" rel="alternate" href='http://example.com/fr" hreflang="fr" rel="alternate" href='http://example.com/it" hreflang="it" rel="alternate" I have two questions 1. Do I need a canonical tag pointing to example.com ? 2. On the homepage without the parameter, should I add self referencing hreflang tags? (href="http://example.com/" hreflang="es" Thanks so much for your help! Kyle
Technical SEO | | TeespringMoz0 -
Hreflang tag implentation
Hi, We've had hreflang tags implemented on our site for a few weeks now, and while we are seeing some improvements for the regional subfolders I wanted to double check I had the tags implemented correctly (a couple of examples are below). However while the regional subfolder sites are now ranking instead of the US site for some keywords, some key search terms are still returning the US site. Could this be due to incorrect implementation for that specific page? Due to complications with using Magento we're implementing the tags in the site maps. Also magento appears to be inserting a rel canonical tag automatically for each page and self referencing e.g. On www.example.com/uk/security-cameras (one of the pages we're having issues with) the canonical tag is http://www.example.com/uk/security-cameras" />. Is this an issue? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks. <url><loc>http://www.example.com/uk/dvrs-kits</loc>
Technical SEO | | ahyde
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/uk/dvrs-kits/1080p</loc>
<lastmod>2014-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>0 -
Canonical URL Tag: Confusing Use Case
We have a webpage that changes content each evening at mid-night -- let's call this page URL /foo. This allows a user to bookmark URL /foo and obtain new content each day. In our case, the content on URL /foo for a given day is the same content that exists on another URL on our website. Let's say the content for November 5th is URL /nov05, November 6th is /nov06 and so on. This means on November 5th, there are two pages on the website that have almost identical content -- namely /foo and /nov05. This is likely a duplication of content violation in the view of some search engines. Is the Canonical URL Tag designed to be used in this situation? The page /nov05 is the permanent page containing the content for the day on the website. This means page /nov05 should have a Canonical Tag that points to itself and /foo should have a Canonical Tag that points to /nov05. Correct? Now here is my problem. The page at URL /foo is the fourth highest page authority on our 2,000+ page website. URL /foo is a key part of the marketing strategy for the website. It has the second largest number of External Links second only to our home page. I must tell you that I'm concerned about using a Cononical URL Tag that points away from the URL /foo to a permanent page on the website like /nov05. I can think of a lot of things negative things that could happen to the rankings of the page by making a change like this and I am not sure what we would gain. Right now /foo has a Canonical URL Tag that points to itself. Does anyone believe we should change this? If so, to what and why? Thanks for helping me think this through! Greg
Technical SEO | | GregSims0 -
Optimizing Dynamic landing pages in specific Geo-Locations
I have a website that has a a dynamic URl for individual dealer landing pages - this works based on the geo-location tool on the site. When a user comes it it will recognize their location based on IP address then present the appropriate content based on zip code logic. Example URL: http://www.3mwater.com/?___store=dealer Example URL: http://www.3mwater.com/dealer/ Question: How can I best optimize each individual page for each individual dealer when the URL stays static regardless of dealer? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Yanez0