Does IP filtering have a negative impact on SEO?

[White.net]

If a large site has multiple regions (Australia, USA, UK, France), how will IP filtering to a particular area affect SEO.

e.g: Ilive in the UK an if I visit the said website I would automatically be redirected to the UK subfolder of the site whereas somebody searching in Australia would be redirected to the AUS folder.

Will there be any detrimental affect on SEO and will the search engines still be able to crawl the entire site no matter which data centre is being used?

[ReneReinholdt]

actually it will affect SEO in a positive way, since google will notice that the hosting server is located in the region it targets. BUT and there are several:

• You will have unhappy visitors, what if I visited your site while I was travelling in Spain, since I don't understand a word Spanish I wouldn't be a very happy camper.
• Google will only see one of your languages since it has a fixed IP.

The right way to do it:

• have a separate domain name for each country. Eg: Danish target group .dk English UK .co.uk English US .com German .de and so on
• Have a well written (translated by a translator not google translate) version for each language
• Give the visitor the opportunity to select the language he/she want to read, don't force them, guide them.
• have your different languages hosted in the target areas.

[White.net]

Thanks for your response.

The site currently sits on a .com domain and is split by 8 regions all in English. They are looking to go into non-english speaking countries but not yet.

In Google.com.au when searching for the brand the .com version comes up top with United States next to the URL and the AUS part of the site is below, even though they are geo located. What they are thinking of doing is if they click on the USA link it will check to see if they are in Australia and forward them to the Australian sub-section.

There has been talk about ccTLDs but this would be a massive amount of work and is not currently possible due to the amount of duplicated work that would be involved from their point of view.

I am trying to back up any response that I give ensure the correct path is taken.

Would you recommend not to use IP filtering?

[ReneReinholdt]

I would never recommend multiple domains for the same content. it will generate duplicate content and will harm you more then help you.

I think you should do the following, check the IP look it up and then ASK! the user if he/she wants to go to the Australian version or stay at the American version. Or maybe have dynamic content that makes the user aware of the Australian office.

I would personally have all of the TLD's point to different sites with different content. That way you can GEO target, have the sites located localy and use local TLD's all of witch will help you out greatly in your SEO efforts.

Here's to hoping my reply made sense

[StalkerB]

I do this on most of my sites and haven't seen anything bad happen. In fact a quick trip to Google.fi (just to check) shows mysite.com/fi/ followed by mysite.com (with inline sitelinks) and then mysite.com/fi/page and mysite.com/page, so seems fine.

Other subfolders with less links going into them (Germany for example) have mysite.com and mysite.com/de/

So UK IP directs them to site.com/uk, AUS IP to site.com/aus, yeah?

A couple of considerations.

1. Allow users to select what language they want once they're on the site (and make it obvious how to change). To get this to work make sure you check the referral header and if it's from site.com don't impliment the IP redirect.

Having a drop down in the header also means Google can get to all of your language subfolders.

2. Set your targeted country in webmaster tools. You can do this for subfolders quite easily.

There should be no problem even with same language (English) content as long as you do this.

A bit of further reading for you

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-info-from-google-and-yahoo-tilts-the-geotargeting-balance

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

If you need any specifics, let me know

[White.net]

Perfect, thank you both for your help.