What is the best way to redirect visitors to certain pages of your site based on their location?

[Firestarter-SEO]

One website I manage wants to redirect users to state specific pages based on their location. What is the best way to accomplish this?

For example a user enters the through site.com but they are in Colorado so we want to direct them to site.com/colorado.

[blitzna10]

I can't give you a technical answer. But, from what I understand, you are best off "suggesting" what page they should be redirected to, as opposed to automatically re-directing them. (but Ill stand corrected).

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Yes, based on the location and their IP, you can redirect users to the proper webpage they are supposed to see.

I will reference a great answer from Dirk about this that you can read here. I learned a lot from this, as my answer in the thread is obviously wrong.

Another source Dirk references is this blog post from Matt Cutts - check it out.

Hope this all helps! Good luck!

[Firestarter-SEO]

Blitzna10, I agree that we should suggest a page rather than forward them to the page we "think" they should go to. However, I have been out voted ;(.

If we have to forward users to a state specific page, what is the best method to do so? A 301, 302, JS redirect, Some other technology I am unaware of?

Currently we are using a 302.

[N1ghteyes]

There are a number of solutions, perhaps the easiest and best solution is to add Cloudflare to your site, and take a look at this blog:

http://netjunky.net/redirect-web-traffic-based-on-country-origin/

(this assumes your website runs on PHP)

[Firestarter-SEO]

Does cloudflare work on state level?

[N1ghteyes]

Thats a good point actually, being UK based, i tend to forget States in the US is how you're likely to do location redirects (that and i read Colorado as Canada... my bad).

The short answer i think is not directly. You could use the users IP address and something called mode_geoip in order to handle the redirects, it takes a bit more configuration and setup though.

Im seeing lots about redirecting on country, not all that much on redirecting on state, but a good starting point is perhaps this Stackoverflow thread. It's probably something you'll need to ask a developer to do.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9838344/how-to-redirect-domain-according-to-country-ip-address