Redirecting users based on location

[theLotter]

My site is available in EN, DE, SW, SP, FR, IT, CH and JP.

However, the EN sites ranks much better than the other languages, and even when searching in another language the EN homepage is normally the result that appears.

Would it be worthwhile to automatically redirect users to the site in the same language they are searching in or country they are searching from? If so, how do I go about this?

Thanks!

[coremediadesign]

I think the only option would be to either have separate sites / urls or - redirect user to the relevant version of the site when they first land on your site, by checking their geo location. Now, if you're using one site and redirect, then I'm presuming you're still using the same urls - it's just the content that changes accordingly based on the location.

It looks like international versions of Google services are hosted in specific countries as their IP address changes - try for instance google.ru, google.pl etc. and you'll see using the SEOMoz toolbar that the IP is different, but I'm not quite sure if crawlers are only coming from the main server or not. Perhaps someone else could answer this.

You can do redirection using two methods : Javascript or Server side technology. Depending on what server technology you're using there are several classes / scripts available out there. Here's an example of one for PHP : http://www.geoplugin.com/webservices/php

The HTML5 has a built in Geolocation API, which you can read more and see some examples of here :  http://merged.ca/iphone/html5-geolocation

With HTML5 Geolocation you will always be first asked if you want to allow the site to use your location - this is something you cannot get rid of.

I hope this helps a bit.

[DeptAgency]

Hi SaraSEO,

I don't think redirecting visitors based upon country is wise because of the following reasons:

• The Search Engine crawlers are not neccissarily located in the country they crawl for and might not be able to crawl all languages.
• Redirecting Users but not Crawlers could be considerd cloaking
• There might be German speaking people in sweden getting very annoyed not being able to see the german version. - Google explicitly advises not to do this:

"Make sure each language version is easily discoverable

Keep the content for each language on separate URLs. Don’t use cookies to show translated versions of the page. Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click.

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."

source: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192&topic=2370587&ctx=topic

Greets,

Sven

[nbyloff]

I haven't redirected users by country, but I am doing it by US state for certain services on a site.

1. When a user visits the page from a state we offer the service in, they are 302 redirected to the state specific page

2. When a crawler visits the page, they are NOT redirected anywhere

3. On that same page, we have links pointing to the state specific page so they can be discovered by the crawler

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Sara,

The GEO-IP redirect 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 (nicer for users) and allows both versions to be crawled.

My recommendation would be to implement something like that rather than a hard redirect to a specific language version.

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[underdogmike]

Thanks for your response!
May I ask how you achieved this? I have a client that wants to show different content based on US State Location.

Thanks