301 re-direct affect on SERPS

[steviechat]

Hi Moz Community, please can I hit you with a scenario and get your thoughts?

We have a client site - clientsite.com - with reasonable rankings for some of our client's target search terms/branded terms.

We have built language specific subdomains - it.clientsite.com, de.clientsite.com - which have been manually translated into local languages.  These subdomains have robots 'noindex' as we only want to drive traffic to clientsite.com.

We've installed a geo location tool on clientsite.com that 301s visitors to the appropriate subdomain, so content is served in their local language.  clientsite.com will be the 'catch all' for locations where sub domains have not yet been created.

If Google crawls clientsite.com and is 301ed to a sub domain, will we lose SERPS?  The sub domains will have the same content (99% the same content anyway) as clientsite.com, but in local languages.

Cheers guys.

Steve

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Steve,

Have they thought about using HREF Lang and opening up the other sites to be indexed. I feel like from what you're describing that that might be the way to go for them as it takes the advantage of localized content and experience but also makes sure that you wouldn't sacrifice the rankings for these keywords as it wouldn't necessarily require the use of a 301 redirect.

Martijn.

[steviechat]

Thanks very much, Martijn, this wasn't something I was aware of.

Cheers

Steve