To Overlay or Not to Overlay? Country Selector

[Bio-RadAbs]

Hi guys,

We deal with a global audience and our site is a mixture of resource and e-commerce product pages.

This has led us to avoid having a 'select your country' as the first page of the website but only have the option show up when the user is browsing products (price is shown dynamically according to country)

The thing is, currently the "select your country" option is a page and this is creeping up the 302 redirects. Everytime a user goes to a product page, boom they get redirected to the 'select your country' page and then sent back to the corresponding page.

I'm been thinking the solution might be to remove the "select your country" as a page and go down an "overlay popup".

For SEO purposes, what would you suggest? I'm reading Javascript overlays could work but not good for SEO.

Welcome all thoughts..

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Overlay pop up would be the way to go. Keeps users on the page and is just much cleaner. There is no problem with Javacript overlays for SEO (unless you are trying to rank for "select your country")

My suggestion is to just capture the visitors country via IP and auto-select the country for them. Then you can have a drop-down or "click to change country" icon somewhere on your site that would let users fix any erroneous autoselections.

Cheers
-Oleg

[Bio-RadAbs]

Thanks Oleg,

I thought of "forced IP" but felt it might be more of an annoyance to the user. I need to sit down and do a pro vs con of the overlay and IP options to finalise my decision.