Canonical Question: Root Domain Geo Redirects to SubFolder.

[blake.runyon]

Howdy,

Working on a larger eComm site that 302s you based on your location. With that in mind should I canonicalize the final page.

domain.com => 302 => domain.com/us/, domain.com/fr/, etc... (Should these all have a canonical pointing to the root domain.com?

[anthonydnelson]

If you are just changing the content a bit based on location, I think canonicalizing them all back to the root page is OK.

If this is redirecting based on translations, you should look into using the hreflang tag. It tells the search engines that there are alternate versions of the page in different languages.

Here are some resources for you.

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
• https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

Once that is in place, each page can canonicalize to itself.

• domain.com/us/
• domain.com/fr/

[DirkC]

Be careful when redirecting based on ip - you have to make sure that Googlebot (accessing your site with a Californian ip) can access the non-US versions. If you have a link on each page to change the version to another country (and these pages are accessible without being redirected) you should be ok.

An alternative to ip based redirection is to use your main domain for a country select page and to store the selection in a cookie - so you can redirect to the chosen version on subsequent visits. Check volvocars.com as an example. The advantage is of this method is that you give control to the user (I personally find it quite annoying when I'm being redirected to the local version when I'm abroad and want to visit my "home" version).

rgds,

Dirk

[blake.runyon]

So in this case we don't need point a canonical from the subfolder to the root. But I need something like...

So then... will domain.com/us/ start ranking for google.com or will domain.com rank for google.com?

[blake.runyon]

Dirk,

Great thoughts! We're currently talk through out long term international strategy right now. We're running about 20 local sites times 3 brands. Some are on subfolders, some on subdomains, and some on ccTLDs... so this is pretty tough right now.

We luckily caught an issue with Googlebot not being able to access internationally and corrected it. So I think we're safe on that front.

Most of the regions are cross accessible (Europe/APAC/North America) but you can't get from Asia to Europe if you need to from the site. So that's on our radar!

[DirkC]

As far as I understand there is no content on domain.com so your last line makes no sense.

If you want the default version to be the us version you should put

Don't forget that hreflang needs to be placed on every page of your site - you can check if the implementation is correct here: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/

Dirk

[blake.runyon]

My only concern is domain.com/us/ showing up on google instead of domain.com

Is there anything I can do too keep it the SERP juice going to domain.com instead of the subfolder?

[DirkC]

To be very honest I don't think it will make a difference if it's going to the /us/ version rather than the root.

If you prefer - you could keep the us version on the root & only redirect the non-us visitors to a country version.

Dirk

[blake.runyon]

Thanks for the tips man!