International SEO (USA & UK)

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

I have a client project site thats been operating successfully in the UK now for a few months and looking to expand offer to USA.

Their dev team thinks best to have a UK & US subfolder with IP sniffer serving up the relevant version depending upon ip location

Apart from price differences and some spelling differences content will likely be duplicate.

Please can anyone offer advice in regard to the above such as links to latest international seo resources/articles etc (i have seen Aleydas great WBF).

If anyone has any experience of above scenarios (i.e. knows of probs with ip sniffer method in regard to seo or essentially having dupe folders for uk & usa just with local differences) then any advice comments will be much appreciated ?

Many Thanks

Dan

[Milian]

Hey Dan,

If you are correctly using rel="alternate" hreflang= meta tags or sitemaps, then it shouldn't matter if you have mostly similar content. One of Google's examples is just like your question:

Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland. Now, your question on IP sniffing is a slightly different kettle of fish. Google contradict themselves in their own guidlines!

On this page, Multi-regional and multilingual sites, they say:

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. Yet here, Introducing "x-default hreflang" for international landing pages, they say:

The homepages of multinational and multilingual websites are sometimes configured to point visitors to localized pages, either via redirects or by changing the content to reflect the user’s language. And then there is this recent video from Matt Cutts: Is redirecting users based on their location spam?

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thats great info thanks very much Maximilian !!

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi Max

So do you need an individual site map for each country subfolder as well as hreflang, or either or (since you say or) ?

Should subfolders be of the format /en-us/ & /en-gb/ etc ?

Any resources you recommend for finding the right way to deal with IP sniffing or not ? or preferred alternate solutions ?

Many Thanks

Dan