Different Home Sites for different Countries but same Language

[leitpix]

We'r starting a new webshop soon and and one of our programmers came up with the following:

Different Home Sites (Index Pages) for Austria and Germany.

The Language is both times German but some words are different than others. The customer would like to have that.

So we would have:

domain.com (No Austrian or German IP Address)

domain.com/at/ (User with Austrian IP Adress)

domain.com/de/ (User with German IP Address)

Is this SEO wise a disadvantage?

How to set up the canonicals? DE & AT Page with the Canonical on the main Domain?

Any advice?

Thank you

[irvingw]

If you canonical them all to the main pages there is no sense in creating the at and de sites because you are just telling google to credit them to the main site

Don't worry about them being in the same language, it is not duplicate content if you are targeting each section for a different region.de will get filtered and not show in austria and at will get filtered and not show in germany

a) make sure you add the proper language meta for each region and on every page

b) properly geo target the folders in google WMT

c) update the content to mention the country and location on each section

d) the IP of the server is not important

what do you mean by this? (No Austrian or German IP Address) who are you geotargeting for the TLD

[leitpix]

Thank you for your response!

With Austrian/German IP I mean, that we planed to redirect the user IP wise.

So if anybody comes to the site with an ip from Austria he should be redirected to the /at site

If anybody comes to the site with an ip from Germany he should be redirected to the /de site

Data comes from GeoIP Database.

So you'r saying, that we don't need a main Home Site?
How do the crawler know where to go?

Best case would be to have domain.com/AT/ indexed in Google.at

and domain.com/DE/ indexed in Google.de

a) Language Meta would be the same for /AT and /DE because the language is german in both countries.

b) Will check how this works

c) What do you mean with update the content to mention the country and location?
Content wise there won't be much difference. That's why im concerned about DC.
The difference would be some headlines and the terms of delivery!