Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?

[ajarad]

Hello all

Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve.

Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country.

Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country.

The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following:

www.example.com/ca-en
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
...

If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en

We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags.

Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions:

1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302? 
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections?

2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly.

I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure.

Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

[Keszi]

Hi Marcel,

Let us not forget that in order to be able to rank with your website, you will have to give the possibilities for Search Engines to make 3 steps: 1. Crawl 2. Index 3. Rank

One of the best solutions that I have seen for your case is what Specialized Bikes uses (www.specialized.com

So As I have seen they have an IP sniffing on the main address only: www.specialized.com which will then redirect you to your location's store (for me it is http://www.specialized.com/ro/en/home/ for a person from the US it should be http://www.specialized.com/us/en/home/ and so on for each country which they have specified).

This is good, because then in Google Webmasters Tools they can create separate profiles for each folder: /ro/ /us/ /fr/ etc.

This means that they can still create a sitemap.xml for each of the "stores" and they can submit the sitemaps from Google Webmaster's Tools and avoid crawling issues. (And if you check via proxy different local Google results, you will see that they still rank quite good).

The problem comes with the same language content on different countries where you could:

1. insert Hreflang
2. get local some nice LOCAL links for both

(at least this is what I would try to do)

Now to respond your question, I quote:

1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?

A: This wont be a temporary redirect, so be sure to use 301! 302 redirect will retain the "link juice" on the old version. For reference check the following article of Dr. Pete: http://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes

If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)

A: Depends who do you redirect to.

P.S. As you mentioned you will have duplicate content issue because of us-en and ca-en, which Ideally it shouldn't be a problem:

“Duplicate content and international sites

_Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries.”  _Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192

if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections?

I wouldn't advise you to do so. If it is a permanent redirection, let it be a 301.

So before making the huge step, I would advise you to go through some steps:

1. create a full list of incoming links
2. Sort your list of links for relevance, quality and geo-location
3. Make the change in the URL system
4. Start contacting your most important linking partners and kindly ask them to change the old links into the new versions (from example.com to example.com/us/en/ or if it is a French link from Canada then from current version to the example.com/ca/fr/ version and so on)

I know it is really a huge work, but it will grow its fruits.

Good luck!

Istvan

[ajarad]

Thanks István Keszeg for your clear and detailed answer.

I still have some questions:

1- redirection will not be for 1 version, but for several pages (ca-en, us-en, uk-en) then would the link juice be divided on these 3 version? put in other words, will that effect our current SEO ranking for the words we are currently ranked for?

2- (point no . 2 in my first post).

Thanks in advance.

[ajarad]

Other opinions are highly appreciated, Thanks for everyone in advance.

[john4math]

For geo-redirects, I do not recommend you use 301 redirects.  Browsers can cache these, so if you tell a browser in Canada that example.com should redirect to www.example.com/ca-fr, and later the user changes their language to English, and then tries to go www.example.com, the browser could use that redirect again to go back to the French version without hitting your server.  301 tells the browser that www.example.com ALWAYS (permanently) goes to www.example.com/ca-fr.  Page rank isn't really a consideration with these, since Googlebot always comes from the US, so it should never hit these redirects.  If example.com always goes to one of the versions via a redirect (i.e. you don't serve content under that root URL), then you do have a bit of problem with redirects.  You don't want to 302 Googlebot to another page for your home page, but at the same time, you want to avoid weird redirect behaviors for your customers.

Google can visit the international versions directly without redirects, right?  They should have no problem indexing those pages then.

I agree with István, get some local links to your different local versions, register them each with Google Webmaster Tools (and Bing), put up sitemaps for each, and implement the hreflang tags in your sitemaps (or pages).  That way Google can easily index each version, and knows exactly what each version is for.