Geotargeting a folder in GWT & IP targeting
-
I am curently managing a .com that targets Canada and we will soon be launching a .com/us/ that will target the US. Once we launch the /us/ folder, we want to display the /us/ content to any US IP. My concern is that Google will then only index the /us/ content, as their IP is in the US.
So, if I set up .com and .com/us/ as two different sites in GWT, and geotarget each to the Country it is targeting, will this take care of the problem and ensure that Google indexes the .com for Canada, and the /us/ for the US?
Is there any alternative method (that does not include using the .ca domain)? I am concerned that Google would not be able to see the .com content if we are redirecting all US traffic to .com/us/.
Any examples of this online anywhere?
-
Geotargeting is not uncommon and the search engines are pretty good at negotiating sites using it, depends on your implimentation though.
We use geotargeting of users on our site to send users to /country/ based on their IP, with a few conditions.
-
Users are only redirected when coming to the homepage, either as direct or from search.
If a user from France is coming to the main dot com we'll send them to the /fr/ site automatically.
If the user tries to get to the homepage via a search engine we redirect them to the appropriate language site. This is because the main dot com often shows up above or near the /country/ sites in search, especially for brand terms.
If a user has been given a subpage for a search (e.g. site/cat/page/) then they won't be redirected as we assume the search engines have done a decent enough job at matching them to a page they want. -
Users/bots can override the routing.
Users can internally navigate to other languages through the language menu.
If we send somebody in France to the French site, but they only speak English, instantly forcing them back to the /fr/ site will just frustrate them.
Link to the other language sites on your pages and check referral headers, if internal do not redirect.
All language folders are specified in WMT and it definitely works.
So Google comes in to the dot com, in the header there is a link to the /us/, so they'll crawl down that link getting both versions of the sites in their index.
You biggest challenge here is getting the /us/ ranking above the dot com in the USA, which will require some creative link building
Make sense?
-
-
Hi Bobby,
What eBay used to do when you were reaching the www.ebay.com from Québec in Canada, it used to display a lightbox saying something like : "Hey, we have a french canadian version of our website, would you like to use it? Click here" and then you would be redirected to www.cafr.ebay.ca
So, my suggestion is, instead of using a 301 redirection to redirect the user to the appropriate geotargeted portion of the website, let him chose by showing him a friendly javascript lightbox.
As web spider won't be prompted the javascript lightbox, they will be able to crawl and index both version without problem.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.
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
-
Webpages & Images Index Graph Gone Down Badly in Google Search Console Why?
Hello All, What is going on with Sitemap Index Status in Google Search Console :- Webpages Submitted - 35000 index showing 21000 whereas previously approx 34500 were index. Images Submitted - 85000 index showing - 11000 whereas previously approx 80000 were index. Whereas when I search in google site:abcd.com is it showing approx 27000 index for webpages. No message from google for penalty or warning etc.Please help.
Technical SEO | | wright3350 -
Geographical targeting with Magento
We have a Magento store, with multiple stores/domains setup. There is only really one reason that we have the multiple domains; we use an automatic GEOIP store switcher to send a customer to the right store, so that they pay the proper shipping, see the proper pricing etc, and a couple small differences in the design templates. But all the content is identical. So we have: domain.com (main website)
Technical SEO | | maartenvr
domain.ca (where most other countries are directed to based on GEOIP)
domain.eu Since the content is the same, what is the best strategy here? I looked at several options: 1. Custom canonical urls, making each page on the .ca and .eu use canonical url of the .com
2. Completely block the .ca and .eu from robots.
3. Leave it the way it is0 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
GWT and html improvements
Hi all I am dealing with duplicate content issues on webmaster tool but I still don't understand what's happening as the number of issues keeps changing. Last week the duplicate meta description were 232, then went down to 170 now they are back to 218. Same story for duplicate meta title, 110, then 70 now 114. These ups and downs have been going on for a while and in the past two weeks I stopped changing things to see what would have happened. Also the issues reported on GWT are different from the ones shown in the Crawl Diagnostic on Moz. Furthermore, most URL's have been changed (more than a year ago) and 301 redirects have been implemented but Google doesn't seem to recognize them. Could anyone help me with this? Also can you suggest a tool to check redirects? Cheers Oscar
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin
Hi all, so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands. We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more. We always write unique content for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags. We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content Recently we have concentrated to ensure that page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100 We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc). product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible. From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally). So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping? Thanks for any comments and / or help.
Technical SEO | | jasef0 -
Keyword targeting & differentiation between similar keywords
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around keyword targeting when two keywords are very similar. Here's my dilemma, lets just I sell ACE brand Widgets I'm doing well with “ACE Widgets” queries but not “ACE” How do I fix this since “ACE” is already all throughout the results page & supposedly anchor text is playing a less and less significant role in link relevancy so just getting links with “ACE” as the anchor text wouldn't really help (I wouldn't think) Just a little confused. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
How narrowly geo targeted should your Google Places page be?
Hi Mozers I'm still struggling with my London based client with two locations and one business. Basically she has a location in W1W 'Westminster' and a location in 'WD!' Borehamwood. Has anyone any good resources of input concerning geotargeting. I've done some searching but can't get quite the help I'm seeking. I'd like to make the Pages cover a 5mile radius and be highly specific to their locations. Is this the right way to proceed? Thanks
Technical SEO | | catherine-2793880 -
New URL or Folder Off Existing Site
I am working on a project that is promoting dining in a particular region of the southwest for a destination marketing company. The parent Web site is an authority in the region and ranks well for almost all terms related to the leisure experience in the region. A completely separate Web site was built to promote this culinary program as it involves a committee of different stakeholders, but it’s solely focused on the region. My question is this. The site is on a different CMS, etc., but the overall experience on the site is similar to the parent DMO site in terms of creative. The client has a brand new domain that they purchased for this initiative, but we are also considering mapping the parent site URL to the new culinary site. Parent: www.regionalsite.com New Themed Site: www.regionalsite.com/theme/ Or www.themeurl.com My fear is that if I take the approach of the new URL that it will take forever for the site to build any link clout at all, as the client doesn’t really get the fact that working a link strategy is so critical. However, I know that having links from the regional site over to the theme URL will have an impact. Also, if I do take the approach of mapping the URL to a new folder off of the parent domain, do I risk that 2<sup>nd</sup> tier links on the micro-site will have a challenge indexing as they will essentially be on tier 3? Any advice would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | VERBInteractive0