Personalised Geo-targeted results - How does Google pass link juice?
-
Hello,
Many websites now serve specific home page offers based on the location of the customer, my question is, how does link juice flow around a site when the links (this case from the homepage) are served up based on a visitors location? Internal links from your homepage are valuable for ranking that product well in the SERPs so how does Google deal with this?
So, for example, a car hire website based in the UK. If you arrive on the care hire website sat in Manchester (Northern UK city), on the homepage the website serves offers of car hire deals in Manchester, Leeds, London and international destinations. If you arrived on this website from London (Southern UK City), you would not see the Manchester link at all but London, and other cities in the South.
In this case, when Google crawls the car hire website, it will see internal links but a)which version and b) is there any way of sharing this link value around?
Basically, we want to understand if Manchester in this case will get the benefit of an internal homepage link from Google even though we only show Manchester to people FROM Manchester, OR, do Google only give juice based on one version of the website, a generic UK version?
Or to put it another way, is there any way of cashing in on both geo-targetting the customer based on their location AND getting link juice from those geo-specific home page links? Perhaps there is some code or way of telling Google that people from Manchester (a certain % of our visitors) will see a homepage internal link for Manchester that will pass some small % link value?
-
Hi Xoffie,
Google passes around link juice based on the version of the site that Googlebot is served when it crawls your site. Googlebot has a few IP addresses (which will indicate it's location for your server to choose a version of your homepage), but most of them are in the US, so it's likely that Google will see the US version of your site.
So the question is, is the US version of your site what you want Google to see?
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
-
How does Google treat significant content changes to web pages and how should I flag them as such?
I have several pages (~30) that I have plans to overhaul. The URLs will be identical and the theme of the content will be the same (still talking about the same widgets, using the same language) but I will be adding a lot more useful information for users, specifically including things that I think will help with my fairly high bounce rate on these pages. I believe the changes will be significant enough for Google to notice, I was wondering if it goes "this is basically a new page now, I will treat it as such and rank accordingly" or does it go "well this content was rubbish last time I checked so it is probably still not great". My second question is, is there a way I can get Google to specifically crawl a page it already knows about with fresh eyes? I know in the Search Console I can ask Google to index new pages, and I've experimented with if I can ask it to crawl a page I know Google knows (it allows me to) but I couldn't see any evidence of it doing anything with that index. Some background The reason I'm doing this is because I noticed when these pages first ranked, they did very well (almost all first / second page for the terms I wanted). After about two weeks I've noticed them sliding down. It doesn't look like the competition is getting any better so my running theory is they ranked well to begin with because they are well linked internally and the content is good/relevant and one of the main things negatively impacting me (that google couldn't know at the time) is bounce rate.
Search Behavior | | tosbourn0 -
Google Index Issue - Indexing pages that don't exhist
Hi All, I have noticed a weird issue when performing a search on Google to show me all the pages it is indexing of our site. site:www.one2create.co.uk It brings up most of our website pages but then is also brings up a few HTTPS urls (our site has not been converted to HTTPS yet) but also the URL path, Title, and Meta Description are from one of our clients websites (an Automotive Job site). When clicked they take you to a generic 404 server error page, not our branded 404 page. The site that it has taken the url, title and meta description from is on a different server completely so I don't see how it has even managed to get that information and linked it to our site? Has anyone seen anything like this before? And what is the best way to fix it? We have asked Google to re-index the site but still no luck.
Search Behavior | | Jvickery0 -
Skewed results in Google
Im just curious.. Im sure a lot of you, like me, Google your own search terms on a fairly frequent basis. Does doing this skew the result you are actually seeing? As in, does Google tailor the results more to my liking, and therefore perhaps show my own site (which I would click through to often enough) higher on the page that it actually is? Sometimes I swear that happens. Steve.
Search Behavior | | blitzna100 -
Vanish from google after choosing preferred domain and fixing 40 duplicate meta descriptions?
I recently followed 2 Google webmaster suggestions to clean up the on page SEO for our site. I chose a preferred domain 2 weeks ago(to www.website.com) and fixed the duplicate meta descriptions that our CMS was setting to unique and more natural descriptions for each page. I did that 3 days ago. Webmaster tools still says they are duplicates because it hasn't crawled the whole site yet. We have been fortunate enough to have some of our blog posts be covered by yahoo.com, cnet.com, huffingtonpost.com, gizmodo.com, etc. That is some major backlink juice and, as recently as 2 weeks ago, our website would be the #1 result when searching Google for "ourwebsite.com exact title of very popular blog post". Now it is on the 3rd page, and the top results are the websites that linked to our blog post. So....what gives? Is there a specific area I should look at? Our should I wait for Google to fully index our whole site now that changes have been made? It should be noted that our rankings have stayed the same in yahoo and bing. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Search Behavior | | garyislearning0 -
When Googling site:mydomain.com what does listing order tell us?
To find all the pages on my site that are indexed by Google I can search using site:mydomain.com and it gives pages of results. But what does the order of results relate to? Is it page rank or strength? My list of pages doesn't appear to be in order of strength. And it's definitely not by age or alphabetical...
Search Behavior | | GregB1230 -
From #2 TO Not Found in top 100 Results, WTF?
So my website was #2 for a targeted keyword on google. (6 months ago: # 😎 (3 months ago: #6) (1 week ago: #2). As you can see, it was moving up nicely, now it's not found on the top 100 search results. Only appears #2/(B) in the local search section. Could that be the reason? Websites that appear on the local search no longer appears in the SERP?
Search Behavior | | Droidman860 -
Can I use Google Analytics to find out actual times of visits during the day??
Hi, I'm a newbie at all this - I hope someone can help me. We're thinking of running time-specific offers to try and convert as many of our customer site visits as possible e.g. 15% discount if you call between, say, 2 and 5pm. It would be really helpful to me to find out what times of day people are visiting our site. I can't seem to find a way to do this on Google Analytics. Can anyone help? Thanks so much Sue
Search Behavior | | 3Amigos0