Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
GeoIP - Redirect all but target country
-
My client would like to redirect all non UK traffic from their UK site to their main group site.
I am intending to use a .htaccess redirect, like this:
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} !^GB$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.group.com$1 [R,L]I have tested the redirect at it works fine.
My question is if I put this in place would it have any negative SEO impact on the UK site?
-
Hello, Thanks for this, and this is an old thread but I had a very smilar question to this.
What do you exactly mean by indexation problems?
Do you mean the Google refuse to crawl UK site in this example? So they don't index UK webpages? I don't think this make sense? or I am getting a wrong idea.
I am just wondering where you found this information. I did my homework and SEOmoz ppl talked about "cloaking" video by Matt Cutt and He says GeoIP redirecting is fine? I am no where close to an expert but had to ask this question because I was trying to do the same thing,
http://www.seomoz.org/q/redirecting-root-domain-to-subdirectory-by-ip-addresses-country-specific
Thank you!
-
You're welcome
-
Many many thanks Rebecca!
The quality of this answer makes this years subscription worthwhile, and we are only a month in.
Must have taken you some time, it is much appreciated.
Cheers, Gary.
-
Hi Gary,
This sort of redirect can cause indexation problems.
Typically Google crawls from the US - and as such the bots may only see your US content - no UK content = no UK rankings - so this isn't a solution which I'm keen to recommend.
If you really need to implement something like this, you could try doing what cheapflights.com do. For example if you visit cheapflights.com from a UK IP they redirect you to this international choice page -
This solution allows the bots to crawl both versions of the sites, plus it allows users to select which version of the site they wish to see.
You might also consider one of the following -
a) Don't do any IP redirection, but upweight the links to the international sites so that there is a clear route for users to find the right version of the site.
b) Use IP detection to show a JavaScript overlay suggesting non-UK users might want to visit the main group site - but don't actually redirect them.
I hope this helps
Hannah
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 Redirect - Rank Recovery Examples?
Hi All, I recently did a 301 redirect. Page to Page and the notified google via its console. Its been 6 days since. The home page and one other high traffic page swopped out with the new domain on google search index with 3-4 drops in ranking for each. The rest of the sites pages have been indexed but still reflect the old domain when searched. Recently today my home page dropped even further to the second page of google index for the specific keyword. Can you share similar experiences and how long it took you to recover rank fully? and how long for all pages to swop out on google search's index? Regards Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeBlue10 -
Redirect old image that has backlinks
Hi Moz Community! I'm doing an audit of a website and did a backlink analysis. In the backlink analysis, there is an image that has 66 backlinks but the image doesn't exist on the website anymore (it was on a website that was created in 2011 - 2 web launches ago). I don't believe a 301 redirect will work for an image that doesn't exist anymore. How would I redirect the image URL (it's WordPress so we have a specific URL that other websites are linking to but get 404 errors) without going to each individual website and requesting they change the URL link? Any advice or recommendations would be great. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradChandler1 -
How to target for misspelled Brand name searches
Hi to all the SEO experts here, I am working on SEO of my 4 months old website. For example, its 'abz.com'. We like the brand name 'abz' for the business and we are able to SEO well for keyword 'abz'. However, we would also like to target for the keyword 'abc'. There are 2 reasons for that: 'abc' is an actual word. So there is a possibility that our users may type 'abc' instead of 'abz' to reach us. For 'abc', the top result is 'abct.us', which is a site of adult in nature. Also our website doesn't feature at all in the results. This is hitting us hard in terms of or brand visibility. So the questions are: How to feature in results of keyword search of 'abc'? Will the following approach work: Buying an available domain 'abc.co.in', and use it to feature in 'abc' results and 301 redirect to 'abz.com' Having 'abc' in the page meta (title and description). This is hard for us, since we need to rethink our taglines and copyrights. 2. If we search for 'abz', Google says "Do you mean abc". Is there a way to not have this suggestion? It would helpful to have some more ideas for this problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | manasag0 -
How to do Country specific indexing ?
We are a business that operate in South East Asian countries and have medical professionals listed in Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia. When I go to Google Philippines and check I can see indexing of pages from all countries and no Philippines pages. Philippines is where we launched recently. How can I tell Google Philippines to give more priority to pages from Philippines and not from other countries Can someone help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozil0 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0 -
Redirecting non www site
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record So here is the response from IT: " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain. 301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names. Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank. It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davenport-Tractor0 -
301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
Hello... One of my sites is losing rankings in G. I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links... My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain? If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over? How about the good backlinks? Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
Reverse Proxy better than 301 redirect?
Are reverse proxies that much better than 301 redirects? Should I invest the time in doing this? I found out about reverse proxies here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianmcc0