GeoIP and redirects

[edwardlewis]

I have been looking at an ecommerce site that uses a GeoIP module to take users to the relevant store, eg:

domain.com/uk domain.com/us
domain.com/euro
domain.com/row

After using the SEO Moz site crawler, the GeoIP module is using 302 redirects to take users to the relevant page. So, domain.com 302s to domain.com/uk and so on.

What is the impact of this in terms of SEO? Only the US version of the site was crawled by the site crawler, presumably because this was due to the US version of the site being shown based on the IP address. Links to the other stores are clearly placed in the header of the site but they weren't crawled.

Thanks in advance

[StreamlineMetrics]

Google has never been 100% clear on how to address this specific issue since serving up different versions of a site depending on where the user is located is considered grey hat, but obviously it makes sense from a user's perspective to provide the most relevant content to them as possible. As you stated, the site crawler/search engines will only access the version of the site accessible to them depending on the IP address they are using at the time so that explains why only the US version of the site was crawled. If you changed the IP to one in the UK, then it would likely crawl that version of the site.

Anyways, I think the best route would be to set up a new sitemap for each version of the site and submit them in Google Webmaster Tools. I came across this blog post which did exactly this and it seemed to resolve their problems - http://www.stateofsearch.com/how-to-use-multiple-sitemaps-on-one-domain-for-geo-targeting/. Hope that helps!

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Edward,

I'm really not a fan of GeoIP detection - not because of cloaking - broadly speaking you're fine on that front.

That said I have seen sites that have clearly tripped some sort of cloaking filter and been penalised as a result; they were using GeoIP to deliver either US or UK content on the same page - rather than pushing to .com or .com/uk. But that's kind of off-topic

The potential issue of redirecting people based on GeoIP is that if you don't make your whole site crawlable for the search bots, they'll typically only be able to access and therefore crawl / index the US content (Google mostly crawls from a US IP).

As you can well imagine - if only your US content is accessible to the bots, then that's the only content that ever stands a chance of ranking.

Just an aside - I also don't like it from a UX perspective; just because I'm in the US right now doesn't necessarily mean I'd like to see US content.

As such I prefer to use GeoIP detection, then let the user decide which content they'd like to view. Cheapflights handle this pretty well - if you visit cheapflights.com from the UK you get pushed to this international choice page - http://www.cheapflights.com/workers/profile-select.aspx?sref=CFUK&redirect=GeoIP&geoip=GB&cfref=CFUS&spt=Home&rp=/ - you can then decide which content you'd like to see. Plus the bots can crawl both versions easily.

Hope this helps

Hannah

[edwardlewis]

Thanks for the replies. I created a sitemap for each store last week. I added the links to the robots.txt and also submitted them to Google.

The SEO Moz site crawler now crawls the full site content, but the pages are still recorded as 302 redirects.

The GWT figures are completely wrong where it displays the number of indexed pages..

lmQc