Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
-
Hello all
Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve.
Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country.
Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country.
The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following:
www.example.com/ca-en
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
...If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en
We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags.
Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions:
1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections?2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly.
I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure.
Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance. -
For geo-redirects, I do not recommend you use 301 redirects. Browsers can cache these, so if you tell a browser in Canada that example.com should redirect to www.example.com/ca-fr, and later the user changes their language to English, and then tries to go www.example.com, the browser could use that redirect again to go back to the French version without hitting your server. 301 tells the browser that www.example.com ALWAYS (permanently) goes to www.example.com/ca-fr. Page rank isn't really a consideration with these, since Googlebot always comes from the US, so it should never hit these redirects. If example.com always goes to one of the versions via a redirect (i.e. you don't serve content under that root URL), then you do have a bit of problem with redirects. You don't want to 302 Googlebot to another page for your home page, but at the same time, you want to avoid weird redirect behaviors for your customers.
Google can visit the international versions directly without redirects, right? They should have no problem indexing those pages then.
I agree with István, get some local links to your different local versions, register them each with Google Webmaster Tools (and Bing), put up sitemaps for each, and implement the hreflang tags in your sitemaps (or pages). That way Google can easily index each version, and knows exactly what each version is for.
-
Other opinions are highly appreciated, Thanks for everyone in advance.
-
Thanks István Keszeg for your clear and detailed answer.
I still have some questions:
1- redirection will not be for 1 version, but for several pages (ca-en, us-en, uk-en) then would the link juice be divided on these 3 version? put in other words, will that effect our current SEO ranking for the words we are currently ranked for?
2- (point no . 2 in my first post).
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Marcel,
Let us not forget that in order to be able to rank with your website, you will have to give the possibilities for Search Engines to make 3 steps: 1. Crawl 2. Index 3. Rank
One of the best solutions that I have seen for your case is what Specialized Bikes uses (www.specialized.com
So As I have seen they have an IP sniffing on the main address only: www.specialized.com which will then redirect you to your location's store (for me it is http://www.specialized.com/ro/en/home/ for a person from the US it should be http://www.specialized.com/us/en/home/ and so on for each country which they have specified).
This is good, because then in Google Webmasters Tools they can create separate profiles for each folder: /ro/ /us/ /fr/ etc.
This means that they can still create a sitemap.xml for each of the "stores" and they can submit the sitemaps from Google Webmaster's Tools and avoid crawling issues. (And if you check via proxy different local Google results, you will see that they still rank quite good).
The problem comes with the same language content on different countries where you could:
- insert Hreflang
- get local some nice LOCAL links for both
(at least this is what I would try to do)
Now to respond your question, I quote:
1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
A: This wont be a temporary redirect, so be sure to use 301! 302 redirect will retain the "link juice" on the old version. For reference check the following article of Dr. Pete: http://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
A: Depends who do you redirect to.
P.S. As you mentioned you will have duplicate content issue because of us-en and ca-en, which Ideally it shouldn't be a problem:
“Duplicate content and international sites
_Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries.” _Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections?
I wouldn't advise you to do so. If it is a permanent redirection, let it be a 301.
So before making the huge step, I would advise you to go through some steps:
- create a full list of incoming links
- Sort your list of links for relevance, quality and geo-location
- Make the change in the URL system
- Start contacting your most important linking partners and kindly ask them to change the old links into the new versions (from example.com to example.com/us/en/ or if it is a French link from Canada then from current version to the example.com/ca/fr/ version and so on)
I know it is really a huge work, but it will grow its fruits.
Good luck!
Istvan
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
-
301 Redirect from query string to new static page
If i want to create a redirect from a page where the slug ends like this "/?i=4839&mid=1000&id=41537" to a static, more SEO friendly slug like "/contact-us/", will a standard 301 redirect suffice? Thanks, Nails
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 13, 2018, 2:32 PM | matt.nails0 -
Hacked website - Dealing with 301 redirects and a large .htaccess file
One of my client's websites was recently hacked and I've been dealing with the after effects of it. The website is now clean of malware and I already appealed to Google about the malware issue. The current issue I have is dealing with the 20, 000+ crawl errors which are garbage links that were created from the hacking. How does one go about dealing with all the 301 redirects I need to create for all the 404 crawl errors? I'm already noticing an increased load time on the website due to having a rather large .htaccess file with a couple thousand 301 redirects done already which I fear will result in my client's website performance and SEO performance taking a hit as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 22, 2016, 2:33 AM | FPK0 -
Switching from HTTP to HTTPS: 301 redirect or keep both & rel canonical?
Hey Mozzers, I'll be moving several sites from HTTP to HTTPS in the coming weeks (same brand, multiple ccTLDs). We'll start on a low traffic site and test it for 2-4 weeks to see the impact before rolling out across all 8 sites. Ideally, I'd like to simply 301 redirect the HTTP version page to the HTTPS version of the page (to get that potential SEO rankings boost). However, I'm concerned about the potential drop in rankings, links and traffic. I'm thinking of alternative ways and so instead of the 301 redirect approach, I would keep both sites live and accessible, and then add rel canonical on the HTTPS pages to point towards HTTP so that Google keeps the current pages/ links/ indexed as they are today (in this case, HTTPS is more UX than for SEO). Has anyone tried the rel canonical approach, and if so, what were the results? Do you recommend it? Also, for those who have implemented HTTPS, how long did it take for Google to index those pages over the older HTTP pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 28, 2016, 3:40 AM | Steven_Macdonald0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 18, 2015, 7:48 PM | BrandBuilder0 -
Can an incorrect 301 redirect or .htaccess code cause 500 errors?
Google Webmaster Tools is showing the following message: _Googlebot couldn't access the contents of this URL because the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request. _ Before I contact the person who manages the server and hosting (essentially asking if the error is on his end) is there a chance I could have created an issue with an incorrect 301 redirect or other code added to .htaccess incorrectly? Here is the 301 redirect code I am using in .htaccess: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/.]+/)*(index.html|default.asp)\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(([^/.]+/)*)(index|default) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www.example.com)?$ [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] Could adding the following code after that in the .htaccess potentially cause any issues? BEGIN EXPIRES <ifmodule mod_expires.c="">ExpiresActive On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 31, 2014, 3:00 AM | kimmiedawn
ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 days"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 week"
ExpiresByType text/plain "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 week"
ExpiresByType application/x-icon "access plus 1 year"</ifmodule> END EXPIRES (Edit) I'd like to add that there is a Wordpress blog on the site too at www.example.com/blog with the following code in it's .htaccess: BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Thanks0 -
Too many 301 redirects?
Hey, My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website. These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic. I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website? If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content? For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site: 1099softwarepro.com 1099softwarepro.info 1099softwarepro.net 1099softwarepro.biz 1099softwareprofessionals.com 1099softwareprofessionals.info ...you get the point
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 25, 2013, 7:18 PM | Stew2220 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 6, 2012, 11:04 AM | Visually0 -
How do I go about changing a 302 redirect to a 301.
Hello Friends! Thanks for viewing my question. Ok,My question today is How do I go about redirecting a 302 link to a 301 link. I understand the benefits of doing this as far as link juice and how the Search Engines views the two Re-Directs. I am wanting to know where I would start to do this. Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 25, 2011, 2:01 PM | FrontlineMobility0