Redirecting the .com of our site

[FDSConsulting]

Hey guys,

A company I consult for has a different site for its users depending on the geography. Example:

When a visitor goes to www.company.com if the user is from the EU, it gets redirected to http://eu.company.com

If the user is from the US, it goes to http://us.company.com

And so on.

I have two questions:

Does having a redirect on the .com will influence rankings on each specific sub-site? I suspect it will affect the .com since it will simply not get indexed but not sure if affects the sub domains.

The content on this sub-sites are not different (I´m still trying to figure out why they are using the sub-domains). Will they get penalized for duplicate content?

Thanks!

[KLLC]

Hello,

Redirecting your main domain to sub-domain isn't a good technique in seo practice however it is still useful having some strong reason. As you said your client want a redirect based on geographical location and goes to sub-domain etc. In this matter I just wanna say it is extremely dangerous idea because of providing same content using different URLs could be a penalty be Google. It could be acceptable if you provide language translations with your sub-domains.

I hope this would be helpful to you.

[FDSConsulting]

Anyone else can shed some light on this?

Thanks!

[FDSConsulting]

Anyone else?

[gfiorelli1]

As written by David Sottimano in a comment to my post about International SEO, first consider this:

"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." - support.google.com source

__That's just general advice.

Ask your client this: is it absolutely necessary to deliver the Irish user exclusively to the Irish site? Should the Irish user be able to see other sites?

If the answers are yes and no respectively, you can get away with IP sniffing & server side redirects as long as you do not force redirection on American IPs (Note: Gbot still crawls from the US, but if they change, this won't work). The downsides; usability issues, and the fact that American IPs can see anything they want.

You could also use client side redirection (javascript) with even American IPs with no real consequence (Gbot shouldn't* execute the JS). This is a bit more flimsy, and won't work at all with JS disabled users. Maybe use http://www.wipmania.com/en/api/ for example, and maybe test to see what pisses people off less?

Said that... I would not use geo redirections, but present a box hover or bar (as it does Google when you visit, for instance, Google.it from Finland) where asking if the want to visit the .eu site or prefer to visit the US one (and vice versa). That way you are sure your site will be crawled with not problems (at least not this problem).

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For the duplicated content issue, check out what I write about the rel="alternate" hreflang in my post here on Moz.

[FDSConsulting]

Thank you Gianluca!

As always, your advice is top notch.

Cheers!

F.