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Regional SEO Redirection

by cormacm
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi all,

I'm seeking guidance on the best approach for redirecting users from a ccLTD to a gLTD domain and vice-versa.

The scenario:
  1. My client has website.com for international visitors, and website.co.uk for just UK visitors
  2. We have setup hreflang on both sites and targeted the .com site to US visitors within Google Webmaster Console as this market accounts for 80% of the demand to the .com.
  3. If someone from outside the UK visits the ..co.uk site, we want to automatically redirect them to the .com (and vise-versa).
  4. We have setup a rule that looks up the IP address of the user and checks it against the Max Mind database to determine their location, we then 302 redirect to the appropriate website.
Some questions:
  1. Should it be a 302 redirect? I have read some conflicting things on this.
  2. What should we do to ensure the .co.uk is crawled by Googlebot? Is there a chance we are redirect Googlebot to the .com site when it accesses the .co.uk? How can we ensure Googlebot (and other search bots) can visit the UK site.
  3. Overall, what's the best approach to handle regional redirection for SEO.
I had suggested to the client to lookup the user IP, and present a pop-up to them to ask them if they would like to visit the correct regional site. I feel this is better because it's a more graceful option. However, the prices on both sites are different and the client doesn't want UK people purchasing in dollar from the US site... etc..



Thanks for your help and insight
#redirection #regional #seo
  • Profile picture of the author patadeperro
    Originally Posted by cormacm View Post

    1. Should it be a 302 redirect? I have read some conflicting things on this.
    2. What should we do to ensure the .co.uk is crawled by Googlebot? Is there a chance we are redirect Googlebot to the .com site when it accesses the .co.uk? How can we ensure Googlebot (and other search bots) can visit the UK site.
    3. Overall, what's the best approach to handle regional redirection for SEO.
    1. Yes the redirection is ok.

    2. IF you want to test how your site is seen by search engines there are several ways to do it, the easiest is to install this plug in mozilla firefoz https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...gent-switcher/ it will allow you to simulate different crawlers accesing your site, then you can see what information the crawlers get from your site.

    If you want to take the test a step further I will recomend you to make some test via wget to change the useragent to test how the site is seeing by different crawlers (list of user agents).

    3. I would have used probably a sub domain instead that an entirely different site, but that is just my preference.

    Cheers.
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  • Profile picture of the author shuttles portcanaveral
    Redirection is not bad for SEO.
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