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How can I restrict the domains country by country?
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Hello,
I have Two Domains one is xyz.co.uk and other is xyz.com
Now, my main target for .com is United States, and I don't want to open that .com domain in any other country especially India. The same with the .co.uk, I dont want to open .co.uk in other countries. I did it with some developer help but it gave me redirected error in Google Webmaster. Can anyone please guide me how I can do this the proper way ? And Other issues is, how can I implement ,if any user in United States open xyz.co.uk than he should redirect to the .com version.
Thank you.
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There isn't proper way as you want it.
You can make .com and .co.uk country preferred with geo targeting:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399
but this doesn't limit indian users that type english queries to see your sites in SERP. This is best way IMHO.If you need true protection against indian users then you need to make some changes. You can get list of GeoIP database:
http://php.net/manual/en/book.geoip.php
and based on this code to give users access or stop them.
BUT this is very risky in real world since all bots comes from worldwide. Example - if you disable US IPs on .co.uk then you will stop GoogleBot visiting your site too. Also Roger will be stopped, Bing and many other bots. No bots - no ranking... This can be recognized as sneaky redirect.So i don't recommend you to do this geo ip limitation without calculating all pros and cons of this.
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