International IP redirection - help please!

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

Hi,

We have a new client who has built a brand in the UK on a xyz.com domain. The "xyz.com" is now a brand and features on all marketing. Lots of SEO work has taken place and the UK site has good rankings and traffic.

They have now expanded to the US and with offline marketing leading the way, xyz.com is the brand being pushed in the US.

So with the launch of the offline marketing US IP's are now redirected to a US version of the site (subfolder) with relevant pricing and messaging. This is great for users, but with Googlebot being on a US IP it is also being redirected and the UK pages have now dropped out of the index.

The solution we need would ideally have both UK and US users searching for xyz.com, but would see them land on respective static pages with correct prices. Ideally no link authority would be moved via redirection of users.

We have considered the following solutions

• Move UK site to subfolder /uk and redirect UK ips to this subfolder (and so not googlebot)

• downside of this is it will massively impact the UK rankings which are the core driver of the business - also would this be deemed as illegal cloaking?

• natural links will always be to the xyz.com page and so longer term the US homepage will gain authority and UK homepage will be more reliant on artificial linkbuilding.

• Use a overlay that detects IP address and requests users to select relevant country (and cookies to redirect on second visit)

• this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences.

• Use a homepage with country selection (and cookies to redirect on second visit)

• this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences.

Is there an easy solution to this problem that we're overlooking?

Is there another way of legal cloaking we could use here?

Many thanks in advance for any help here

[AlanMosley]

looks like you have dug yourselfs a hole.

you could with a bit of work, detect where the vistits have come from, and then show prices relevent to the vistis, you will not be done for clocking in this case. There is geo locating solutions out there for detection, and you could write a function that can sort price and then replace all the prices with the function something like @GetCorrectPrice(19.99)

As far as i can tell about clocking by the way, you dont get dome for clocking unless you are trying to decive, if they detect clocking the will have a human look and see why and what you are doing.

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

Thanks for reply, yes its definietly a hole. The more i research the deeper it seems to get. It wasn't our recommendation for the current solution (decided in house) so luckily its not a hole I've dug even though I'm now in it!

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Ralph,

Using an IP redirect to serve country-specific content to the user is fine (i.e. it isn't considered to be cloaking as your intent isn't manipulative). However, there are issues with doing so - as you've highlighted - you're also redirecting the bots so have seen the UK site suffer.

Because of these issues I don't normally recommend the IP redirect approach. I also think that it can be bad for users too - just because someone is in the UK right now - doesn't necessarily mean that they want to see UK content - e.g. they may just be here temporarily on holiday / on business etc.

Personally I would prefer the javascript overlay (your option two) which allows users to pick the relevant country rather than implementing a hard redirect. This will also allow the bots to index both versions of your site.

I do understand the ecommerce team's concerns over this increasing bounce rate - but I'd suggest that if it's implemented well - check out amazon.co.uk from the US - this shouldn't cause you problems with bounce rate.

Likewise I understand their concerns re US / UK customers seeing the wrong content and therefore exposing the price differences - however, again I'd suggest that it's probably more important to have both versions of the site indexed.

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

Thanks Hannah. I think we have managed to convince them to go with a separate site on .co.uk which has always been my preferred approach to international SEO.

I'm always worried that even with the right intentions, there is still a risk of Google misinterpreting.

Separate domains means no confusion.

As for overlays, it works very well for another client of ours and makes no difference to bounce rate. One lesson we did learn was to ensure we had first click free activated!!

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Ralph,

Sounds good to me

Also great shout re first click free!

Hannah

[Swell.com]

Hannah,

We are currently in the requirements phase for an international.xyz.com ecommerce web site. Your overlay recommendation is appreciated and makes sense, but I'm just wondering about the duplicate content issue. Xyz.com and international.xyz.com will essentially be the same sites and both in English, with slight variances in the brand selection and some customer service-oriented messaging. Any insights would be appreciated.

[semvibe]

You can use hreflang & Alternate tag to solve this CCTLD duplication issue. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077