Geotargeting a folder in GWT & IP targeting

[bheard]

I am curently managing a .com that targets Canada and we will soon be launching a .com/us/ that will target the US. Once we launch the /us/ folder, we want to display the /us/ content to any US IP. My concern is that Google will then only index the /us/ content, as their IP is in the US.

So, if I set up .com and .com/us/ as two different sites in GWT, and geotarget each to the Country it is targeting, will this take care of the problem and ensure that Google indexes the .com for Canada, and the /us/ for the US?

Is there any alternative method (that does not include using the .ca domain)? I am concerned that Google would not be able to see the .com content if we are redirecting all US traffic to .com/us/.

Any examples of this online anywhere?

[Guest]

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[G-Force]

Hi Bobby,

What eBay used to do when you were reaching the www.ebay.com from Québec in Canada, it used to display a lightbox saying something like : "Hey, we have a french canadian version of our website, would you like to use it? Click here" and then you would be redirected to www.cafr.ebay.ca

So, my suggestion is, instead of using a 301 redirection to redirect the user to the appropriate geotargeted portion of the website, let him chose by showing him a friendly javascript lightbox.

As web spider won't be prompted the javascript lightbox, they will be able to crawl and index both version without problem.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

[StalkerB]

Geotargeting is not uncommon and the search engines are pretty good at negotiating sites using it, depends on your implimentation though.

We use geotargeting of users on our site to send users to /country/ based on their IP, with a few conditions.

1. Users are only redirected when coming to the homepage, either as direct or from search.
   If a user from France is coming to the main dot com we'll send them to the /fr/ site automatically.
   If the user tries to get to the homepage via a search engine we redirect them to the appropriate language site. This is because the main dot com often shows up above or near the /country/ sites in search, especially for brand terms.
   If a user has been given a subpage for a search (e.g. site/cat/page/) then they won't be redirected as we assume the search engines have done a decent enough job at matching them to a page they want.

2. Users/bots can override the routing.
   Users can internally navigate to other languages through the language menu.
   If we send somebody in France to the French site, but they only speak English, instantly forcing them back to the /fr/ site will just frustrate them.
   Link to the other language sites on your pages and check referral headers, if internal do not redirect.

All language folders are specified in WMT and it definitely works.

So Google comes in to the dot com, in the header there is a link to the /us/, so they'll crawl down that link getting both versions of the sites in their index.

You biggest challenge here is getting the /us/ ranking above the dot com in the USA, which will require some creative link building

Make sense?