International SEO - Alternatives to Automatic IP re-direct
-
Hello,
When doing international SEO I've read that it's not good practice to automatically re-direct users to the correct part of the website based on their IP address. But what alternatives are there to this?
Let's say you're targeting the US and the UK through multiregional SEO. What can you do to ensure that users from the US go to the US sub-directory and that users from the UK go to the UK sub-directory?
In Moz's international SEO guide it says that:
"If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused. Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content."
Can anyone explain this further?
Any help would be much appreciated!
Thanks in advance
-
Thanks for the detailed response Nick - great summary!
"If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused."
I presume web developers would know how to do this?
-
Also just to add:
""If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused." It's about giving the user choice and not force redirecting them aka it's ok to query the language and suggest it, but not force it.
For example, GoogleBot is mostly from USA, so it would be auto-forced to US content options which theoretically means it could miss other versions.
If you are redirected to a particularly language version, you need to give the user the option to switch...
-
Hi there,
Great question!
I must admit that some of the wording for this confused me as well...
I've pasted below some snippets from Google's official guidelines on managing multilingual websites and added my own thoughts here and there: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en/
"If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice." Let the user switch the page language If you have multiple versions of a page:
- Consider adding hyperlinks to other language versions of a page. That way users can click to choose a different language version of the page.
- Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.
Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused.
"If you prefer to dynamically change content or reroute the user based on language settings, be aware that Google might not find and crawl all your variations. This is because the Googlebot crawler usually originates from the USA. In addition, the crawler sends HTTP requests without setting
Accept-Language
in the request header."Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content.
No specific answer or single quote to copy but this covers on-page annotation and XML sitemaps: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077
- Hope this helps as a starter!
Nick
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
-
Does not having any hreflang tags for U.S Visitors lead to an increase in International Visitors?
I have seen a massive increase in International Visitors on our website and visitors within the United States dropped off hard this month (by about 20%). Could it be possible that not having any hreflang tags can lead to an increase in International Customers visiting the site even though your sitemap is set to "Target users in United States" within the Google Search Console? In the Google Search Console, I have International Targeting set to "Target users in United States." However, Google Search Console is saying our site doesn't have any hreflang tags. In the Google Search Console, it says "Your site has no hreflang tags. Google uses hreflang tags to match the user's language preference to the right variation of your pages." I'm not sure when that was flagged, but recently we have seen a massive increase in International Visitors to our site from countries such as Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and so on. This poses a problem since our chances of turning one of those visitors into a customer is extremely slim. Along with that, nearly every international customer is contributing to an extremely high Bounce Rate. Attached is a screenshot of the Error about hreflang tags. https://imgur.com/a/XZI45Pw And here is a screenshot of the Country we are targeting. https://imgur.com/a/ArpWe9Z Lastly, attached is a screenshot of all of the Countries that visited our site today: https://imgur.com/a/d0tNwkI
International SEO | | MichaelAtMSP1 -
International subdomains?
I have a US based site and recently got a backlink from the German version of IGN (de.ign.com). Does that carry the same weight because it is the same root domain?
International SEO | | garyislearning0 -
Wordpress international SEO Plugin - recommendations needed
Hi Mozzers, I am designing the web architecture for a international website and will be using Wordpress. Can anyone recommend a plugin that lets me SEO for all countries? I have used Yoast many times but it does not seem to work for International Web SEO Architectures. Thanks Carla Here is an idea of what I was thinking of doing Homepage.com Irish-homepage.ie or Homepage.com/ie Irish-Subpages.ie or Homepage.com/ie/subpage Irish-Subpages.ie or Homepage.com/ie/subpage Irish-Subpages.ie or Homepage.com/ie/subpage UK homepage.co.uk or Homepage.com/uk UK-subpages.co.uk or Homepage.com/uk/subpage UK-subpages.co.uk or Homepage.com/uk/subpage
International SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
SEO rates in Brazil
This question is for SEOs working in Brazil (please feel perfectly free to reply in Portuguese). I am an independent Local Search consultant living and working in France and would like to get an approximate idea of the range of SEO rates charged in Brazil by independent SEOs. As is the case in any country, I'm sure that rates vary significantly in Brazil. My goal is simply to get an idea of that range. Thanks very much. Ken Fagan (www.kenfagan.com)
International SEO | | Mindful0 -
Cross domain rel alternate, will it help or hurt?
I have a website that has similar pages on a US version and a UK version. Currently we want Uk traffic to go to the US, but the US domain is so strong it is outranking the UK in the UK. We want to try using rel alternate but have some concerns. Currently for some of our keywords US is #1, UK is #4. If we implement rel alternate, will it just remove our US page? We don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot and lose traffic. Is this worth doing, will it just remove our US ranking and our double listing? Any anecdotes, experiences or opinions are appreciated. Thanks.
International SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Does 301 redirect on homepage impact seo strongness of this page
Hi, we are running a multilingual website with this structure : http://www.website.com/en
International SEO | | Samuraiz
http://www.website.com/fr
http://www.website.com/de
http://www.website.com/lang (etc.) with then all onsite URLs this way:
http://www.website.com/en/hello
http://www.website.com/fr/bonjour
http://www.website.com/it/ciao We have a 301 redirect on http://www.website.com going to http://www.website.com/en - except if a user already went on the website and chose a specific language. My question is : Do you think the english homepage will have more seo power if it goes directly to http://www.website.com/ I wonder if we lose some linkjuice with the 301 redirection, as many backlink goes directly to http://www.website.com1 -
Same website in different countries, best practices for SEO?
Hey Guys, I have read several similar questions regarding mine, but none seem to truly cover my question. Basically, we have a company named Junair. We created the website for the company here in Australia (http://www.junair.com.au). As can be seen throughout the page, it mentions that it caters for both Australia and NZ (NZ has its own phone number). It does ok in the rankings at the moment, but rankings will continue to rise in the future once more links are getting picked up. Now however, the Junair team in NZ purchased the NZ domain http://www.junair.co.nz and redirected it to the Australian page. No matter which page you visit on the NZ URL, the URL will never change, and neither will the page title. They have now contacted us and asked to perform SEO on the NZ domain so the NZ domain would show up in searches on Google NZ. At the moment, when searching for "Junair" on google.co.nz, the Australian domain is coming up. How could I change this so the NZ URL would show instead? And what would be the best practices to perform SEO on the NZ URL, should I just create links pointing to http://www.junair.co.nz ? Thank you, Roderic
International SEO | | Michael-Goode0 -
Do non-english(localized) URLs help Local SEO and user experience?
Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.
International SEO | | Amjath0