Google UK picking up USA Site

[matthewdolman]

I have a site with two subfolders one is .../uk and one is .../us

Part of the content on the two sites is the same and part is unique.  The US site's language is set to en and the UK site's language is set to en_gb.  I have setup geo-targeting in webmaster tools.

The problem is that the home page is a GEO-IP redirect and it seems to be picking up information from the US site even on google uk.

I'm not concerned too much about getting the uk site crawled as we submit a sitemap for that anyway.

But my concern is that if I setup the geo-ip redirect as a 301 will my UK site loose all of it's ranking?

Also am I likely to be penalised for duplicate content?

[SEOBrent]

One of the things mentioned at SMX this week was the new "alternate" "hreflang" tag.

Put this tag at the top of your US site:

rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-GB” href=”http://www.example.co.uk/” />

rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-US” href=”http://www.example.com/” />

This will tell the engines that yes you have two "duplicate pages" but this is the correct language for each.

More on alt hreflang here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Matthew,

The hreflang tag which SEOBrent mentioned below may help here - if your content is duplicate.

In terms of implementation you need to place the tag on all versions of the page -

So on http://yourdomain.com/us/page-whatever you'd need:

http://yourdomain.com/uk/page-whatever; /> http://yourdomain.com/us/page-whatever/>

And on http://yourdomain.com/uk/page-whatever - you'd need:

http://yourdomain.com/us/page-whatever; /> https://plus.google.com/u/0/115984868678744352358/posts/9zA3a96XahN

Please also note, you need to pick one canonical version - I've picked the US as I've assumed you get more US traffic - obviously if you get more UK traffic then that should probably be the canonical version. See here - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5299f52953459957&hl=en&fid=5299f529534599570004b9a18f1d46fe

Re your GEO-IP redirect - this isn't an approach I favour - as Google normally crawl from a US IP it can cause indexation problems. As such I prefer something like cheapflights.com implement - if you visit cheapflights.com from a UK IP you are pushed to this international choice page - http://www.cheapflights.com/workers/profile-select.aspx?sref=CFUK&redirect=GeoIP&geoip=GB&cfref=CFUS&spt=Home&rp=/

This allows user to select the appropriate site, and allows both versions to be crawled.

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[matthewdolman]

Super answers, very helpful  Thank you