Setting up a website targeted for the US

[Cybertill]

Hi,

As an English company we have a co.uk domain with .com domain pointing to this. We are now looking to launch a separate (new) website targeting the American market and I have been asked to do the following:

If an American or Canadian IP address visits the .com website it automatically goes to our newly created website i.e. website 2.

If a non-American or non-Canadian IP address goes to .com it automatically goes to the original website i.e. website 1.

If a user is on website 1 and clicks an American flag it takes the website user to website 2.

If a user is on website 2 and clicks on the UK flag it takes the website user to website 1.

Can anyone advise the best way to go about doing this as I feel that this could effect our search rankings. I am concerned how the search engines will penalize website 2 (original site) which has good rankings.

Thanks in advance.

[gfiorelli1]

First of all, let me see if I understood well the situation...

You are going to have to websites:

1. .co.uk targeting Great Britain
2. .com targeting USA and CA

And then you want to use IP detection for redirecting users to the "correct" website depending on their location...

Honestly, I don't like this tecnique...

1. in the 90% of the cases googlebot comes from an USA IP... if you redirect via IP detection you are always redirecting googlebot to the USA/CA website, substantially not letting it to enter and crawl the UK one.
2. as a user who travels a lot, I hate when a website always redirects me to the version it consider I am interested about just because of the IP address. For instance, if I am in Great Britain for travel and I want to visit the USA version of your site because I most interested in it (eg: because of currencies, or because my account is for the USA site), I would rant like a troll if you were obliging me to use the GB version.

I always consider that the best option is offering the users (and the bots) to visit the website version they want  but using this "tactic": if you detect (from IP or Browser agent) that somehow located in the USA/CA entered in the UK site, you can present an alert saying >>> "We saw you're visiting us from the USA/CA. Maybe you are more interested in visiting our USA website [link to your .com version]"

This is what Amazon does.

As an alternative, use redirection based on user browser detection and not IP. That is safer in regards to googlebot.

Said that, the redirection should be automatic just the first time someone enters in your site, and not always present. With this I mean that if someone from USA enters in your .co.uk site, he will be redirected to the .com, but once landed in the .com site, he will be eventually able to click on the link pointing to the .co.uk  and not being redirected again the to american version.