Googlebot and geolocation scripts

[neroma]

Hi guys,

I need some help. Frankly im stumped.

I have a client who is using the geobytes Geodirection tool. For those who do not know what this is

internet geolocation - showing different content to different geographical locations. For instance, different countries.

My question is how does this effect Googlebot. if somebody wanted a certain country listing. will the crawler see this as suspicous because of the redirect?. Will it look at the tld and deciding where to rank the site?. or should the client just stick with the tld for the country he wants rankings for.

How could I check to see if this could be a problem

Kind Regards
Neil

[neroma]

Okay. I have done some more research the meta refresh is causing the site NOT to be indexed.

The reason he wants the redirect, is

The reason it is redirected is that I want a clearly segemented market between UK and Australia, as sales cycles are different in both countries, so I don't want UK visitors on a AU site and vice versa. Is there any way to do a SEO friendly geo redirect, it seems a 301 can't be geo targetted

how about a 301 that just applies to Googlegbot, to a page without the geodirection tool. so google can index the page correctly. would this work?

Kind Regards
Neil

[maneetpuri]

Hi

If you want search engine bots to index country specific pages in country specific domains database then you should give country specific urls to the users/bots according to their IPs. For e.g if bot is from UK it will be served UK pages and will index accordingly.

Hope this helps!

Cheers!

[rainborick]

The major search engines all use only one crawler and they all use IP addresses that come from the US. So if your client's site serves different content based on the user's IP address, the search engines will always see the content served to US visitors. A better approach would be to have static pages designed for each locale so that the search engines can index all of the variations and you avoid having the site flagged for cloaking. The catch comes in the effects of geo-location on ranking.

All of the search engines give a great deal of weight to geo-location in the rankings, even when the user does not request a country-specific search. The theory is that the closer a site is to the user, the more relevant it will tend to be for that user's searches. Overall, the search engines use two common factors to determine geo-location: (1) the presence of a Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), or (2) for generic TLDs like .com, .net, .org, etc., it's the physical location of the server that hosts the site based on its IP address.

The upshot of this is that if your client uses a Country Code TLD like .co.uk or a generic TLD site hosted in the UK, then the search engines will see his site as being located in the UK, and it will be very hard for his pages to appear in the search results for Australian users. Obviously, the reverse would be true for a .au domain or if his host is in Australia.

Google does provide influencing the geo-location of sites with generic TLDs using the Geographic Target Tool in the Webmaster Tools console. So, your client could set up a subdomain or a subdirectory for the content of each specific country to be served. Naturally, this only helps in Google.

Overall, in the long term, I think it's usually best to have separate sites for separate countries so that you have the advantage of geo-location in all of the search engines. But it's not a simple decision and might not be right for your client. If he has a ccTLD, then the second domain is virtually the only practical choice. If he has a generic TLD, then I think that the dedicated subdomain or subdirectory in conjunction with the Geographic Target setting in Google is the best short term solution. It would get the best results in the shortest time and would allow for a fairly easy migration to a separate domain down the road.