How to handle different content on same domain internationally?

[swarming]

Dear community,

I have encountered a unique situation and I am unsure as how to proceed,  I have a U.S. based website for intentions of this question is www.musicstore.com. The customer has decided to offer their products up for sale internationally, however, has two business requirements,  one is that his international presence differs with product offering and content then the domestic version and two, that they both live on the same domain of www.musicstore.com without any reference to offering a differing international presence.  Many of his products are offered for purchase directly overseas, while not against his suppliers rules, it is frowned upon.

All this said, now to my question. I'm currently running a Magento two website install.  With GeoIP setting which version of www.musicstore.com is presented.  Do I have to worry about different content being displayed on the same exact url even though  the experience is completely location based?  If it is a concern, any risks I should be concerned with. I could possibly do something along the lines of www.musicstore.com/in/  while this is not ideal for the customer, if it prevents many larger issues I'd steer the customer this way.    I just want my customer to be able to sell his product internationally without upsetting his suppliers or making Google go, what does this site actually have.

Hopefully I explained my question well enough for those who can help to understand.  Please ask if you need any more information.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,  thank you.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Ian

First, I would thoroughly check the legalities of what you're talking about, just from the customer's company's standpoint. You don't want to get yourself in trouble.

If everything goes well and you get the go ahead, take a look at the following resources:
International SEO (Moz)
The International SEO Checklist (Moz)
Use hreflang for language and regional URLs (Google)

Let me know if this helps - good luck!

[DirkC]

I agree with Patrick on the legal aspects.

If you want to do geolocation it still better to have a separate url. Check this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en  - the red box on the page indicates clearly:

"IMPORTANT: We continue to support and recommend using separate locale URL configurations and annotating them with rel=alternate hreflang annotations."

It continues with: "If your website has pages that return different content based on the perceived country or preferred language of the visitor (i.e., you have locale-adaptive pages), Google might not crawl, index, or rank all of your locale-adaptive content. This is because the default IP addresses of the Googlebot crawler appear to be based in the USA. In addition, the crawler sends HTTP requests without setting Accept-Language in the request header."

While the article also states that Google bot can also use foreign IP adresses, so it would be capable to detect the non-us version of the content, based on the remarks above it doesn't guarantee that the full site will be indexed.

To be honest, I don't think this is a risk your client is willing to take (unless non-us sales are not important)

The hreflang would be useless in this case - as you don't have an alternate url in this scenario.

My advice would be to use geolocation but to redirect non us visitors to an international url (like the alternative you mentioned). You could block access to this site for US visitors but then you create the same dependency of the non-US based Googlebots - which doesn't seem to be advisable). In this scenario you do have the risk that the suppliers would find out that an international version exist.

You might want to check this question as well (http://moz.com/community/q/personalization-software-and-seo)- the geo location in this case was on region/citylevel which is impossible to do.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[PatrickDelehanty]

Dirk - thanks for posting the link to the personalization software and SEO question - I was trying to find that to give you credit - great information!