What is the best way to make country specific IP redirect for only product pricng pages?
-
My website has 3 services and its price will be different for US/EU/Developed world and Asian/African countries.Apart from pricing page, all other things remain same.
I want to use IP based redirect .I heard this thing is called cloaking and used by black-hat guys.
What kind of instructions should I give to my web developer to look best to Google/Search bots and correctly show visitors the intended prices.Is there any caution to be taken care of.
Thanks for your time
-
Points noted.
I am targeting users continent wise.
1)North America
2)Europe,Australia
3)Rest
Hopefully,that will reduce the border overlap problem.(?) I do not mind 1 and 2 be mixed just 3 has to be separate due to my business model and vast Purchasing power parity difference.
Will the error be less than 10-15% seeing the above conditions? Any best practices to minimize?
I appreciate your time,Ryan.
-
In my opinion, you absolutely must offer visitors the ability to manually select their country. I do everything possible to avoid legal contracts, but if a client requested country-based content and refused to allow users to manually change their country I would either refuse to accommodate the request, or would have a legal disclaimer written up. The disclaimer would read something similar to:
"I have requested a change be made to my site which is against the advice of my consultant and the best practices of the SEO industry. I have been advised this change will lead to a negative user experience which will impact my sales and other statistical measurements of my site. "
The issue is however the geo-location is created, there is a 100% guarantee to be errors. There are people and companies who live near borders and otherwise choose ISPs or IPs from other countries. There are also people living, working and visiting other countries. You are forcing these people to view information in a format they do not desire and may not understand.
10-15 years ago, many people felt stuck with the options available on the internet. Those days are long gone. If your website is not presented in a very easy to do business with manner, you will turn buyers into visitors who bounce off your site and go to competitors.
-
Thanks for the answer.
I do not want average users to know what price is offered at other country .Though, somebody going via proxy can know .But,that is not an issue! So,country selection is not an option for me!
I have seen some websites making errors on detecting my country.How to minimize such errors?Is it that difficult for assigning country from IP technically?
-
You might also serve the exact same page to everyone but read the environment variables of the inbound visitor to determine which prices to show.
Or... serve same page to everyone and simply have a dropdown menu or radio buttons for the visitor to select proper pricing.
One problem that you will have is... some people from country A will be buying the service for a location in country B. Lots of transactions on US websites are made by people who are working in or visiting other countries. You might be surprised at how often this happens.
-
Cloaking is defined as presenting different content to search engines then you do to other visitors. Cloaking is an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings and is indeed a black hat practice.
Geographic redirects is a perfectly legitimate practice whereby you wish to show users from specific countries content which has been localized. The localization includes not only currencies but language, units of measurement and cultural references.
Some suggestions for your localized pages:
-
separate content based on country, not language. For example the USA and UK both speak English, but they each use different dialects, currencies and measurements. Depending on what products or services you are offering, you may need to update more then just the pricing.
-
keep the pages on the same domain but use folders to separate country-specific content
-
use the language meta tag on each localized page to indicate it's target
-
offer a method for visitors to change their country manually. I recommend small images of each country's flag. They are very recognizable and understandable.
-
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
-
Duplicate Content Regarding Translated Pages
If we have one page in English, and another that is translated into Spanish, does google consider that duplicate content? I don't know if having something in a different language makes it different or if it will get flagged. Thanks, Ruben
International SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
How to avoid duplication across multiple country domains
Here's the scenario: I have a client currently running one Shopify site (AU) They want to launch three more country domains (US, UK and EU) They want each to be a standalone site, primarily so the customers can purchase in their local currency, which is not possible from a single Shopify site The inventory is all from the same source The product desscriptions will all be the same as well Question: How do we avoid content duplication (ie. how will canonical tags work in this scenario)?
International SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
JavaScript IP-based redirection, best approach?
Hi everyone, What are the best practices for implementing Javascript redirections like on http://www.nike.com/ to send visitors to the right country section? I see it uses cookies and sessions to store the country and language, but what about search engines? Are they redirected via JS? Are there any risks that Google can't crawl everything? We had IP-based, server-side redirections on a few country-specific websites (purehazelwood.com, purnoisetier.fr, purnoisetier.com) that we had to remove because googlebot was always redirected to the US site and couldn't access the other sites. We instead added pop-ups if the visitor is accessing the "wrong" site but we'd like the redirection to be automatic. Is the javascript approach the best? Anything else we need to think about? Thanks for your time!
International SEO | | AxialDev0 -
Why has there been Massive increase in traffic to my clients .eu site after redirects were initiated?
Hi guys, This is a strange one thats really bugging me. I have a client that redirected their domain to a brand new domain that was already live for the previous two months. I have been trying analyse the data however I can't quite understand why there is a massive increase in visitors from the United States when the old site was redirected. The redirection took place at the beginning of July. It was badly managed in terms of the mapping of 301 redirects however thats not the issue here. The level of traffic is gradually decreasing I imagine due to the high level of bounces. The site in question is an EU funded website for education. The old site in the first 2 weeks of June received around 500 visits from the USA while the new site in the first 2 weeks of July (2 weeks into the redirects) received around 3,000 visits from the USA. The new site had previously received only 300 visits for the same period as the old site in the 1st 2 weeks of June. Any idea why this might be? Thanks Rob
International SEO | | daracreative0 -
Country Specific Google Results
Does anyone have any stats (preferred) on users selecting Google results segmented to their country? For instance, users in the UK (France, Japan, etc.) selecting the "Pages from the UK" option to limit results to country based sites? Or if not hard stats, at least any international users care to comment? Cheers, Brian ~identity
International SEO | | identity0 -
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?
International SEO | | White.net0 -
What countries does Google crawl from? Is it only US or do they crawl from Europe and Asia, etc.?
Where does Google crawl the web from? Is it in the US only, or do they do it from a European base too? The reason for asking is for GeoIP redirection. For example, if a website is using GeoIP redirection to redirect all US traffic to a .com site and all EU traffic to a .co.uk site, will Google ever see the .co.uk site?
International SEO | | Envoke-Marketing2 -
Different country, same language
I have read the blog posts by Rand and other community members at YouMoz but i still have a question on trageting and domains / sub-directories usage. Suppose, my business is located in France but my prospects are in US and UK as well. The issue is, they are not English speakers but French. If i use ccTLD, i don't think it will rank well in US and UK. gTLD will not be a good option for prospects in France. What should i do? Regards, Shailendra
International SEO | | IM_Learner1