Geolocation redirect is the act of assigning a geographic location to a website or webpage. Hereby concluding few tips and warnings about using geolocation to redirect users to Country Specific Webpage.
First check the need of geolocation
People want their site to be associated with a particular country, and want search engines to consider their site in country specific search results…coz they think they have a biggest audience in particular country…but most of the times the stats they have got speak wrong…for e.g. AOL’s biggest server is in Canada, meaning anyone anywhere in the world accessing the web through this server will look as though they are Canadian or north American…but its wrong…so check the real need of geolocation, then think of using redirect for that.
Moreover diff search engine use diff methods to associate a particular site to a particular country,
Yahoo use the “Country Code Top Level Domain”(ccTLD)…i.e. .us, .in, .uk etc and also observes the ccTLD of inbound links or backlinks to that particular site.
But google still depends on the IP of the server on which a site is hosted, to associate it with a specific country…so if you want to target google then using redirect for geolocation, will not be good choice.
What to use…301,302 or parking?
If you are really supposed to use geolocation…and want to use redirect for the same…then check your requirements…coz 301 throws away the old and keeps the new, a 302 keeps the old and ignores the new, and a park keeps both.
To be specific:
If you use 301 redirect from the .com domain to the .us, this tells the search engine to pass on all link popularity to the .us, and to not consider the .com as the “proper” website. Its not recommended in this case.
If you use a 302 redirect from the .com to the .us, this tells the search engine that your .com is the “real” domain and that it’s being temporarily redirected to the .us. The search engine will index the .us, but keep the .com as the “original” domain. In short, the .us won’t be considered.
But for 302 you have to use relative links not absolute on your site…Let’s say that a spider follows a link on domain.com to the default page of website, now no country will be associated with that page…Now, let’s say that there is a link on that page that points to domain.com/tools.htm…What country will that page be associated with? Again nothing, because the link to it is using the .com extension, not the .us that you wanted not only for crawling purpose but also for your branding and geolocation. Thus relative linking is good but only if you want some specific pages of a web site to be associated with different places, but difficult if you need the whole site to be related.
In the later case, you would need to create a “geolocation sitemap” with the .com coded as an absolute (not relative) link to each page of your .us site you wanted to be indexed as belonging to USA
If you Park the .com directly on the .us, this associates BOTH domains to the site. Since one is the .us, the site will be considered geolocated. Even in this you have to use relative linking to keep your parked domain .us stay with the visitor for the entire session. But remember that if you use parking, the search engines may take their time to know that this is actually the same website, so till then link popularity of your site will be splitted among the 2 domains, until they are united. This also creates a duplication content issue during this period…so if you can handle 302 properly, well it’s the best option.
Moreover after having your redirects done, don’t forget to do the cclink building (i.e. getting lots of backlinks for .us from actual US websites), as it will be taken in to account by all the major search engines while giving out country wise search results, irrespective of other algorithms.
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November 30th, 2009 at 9:21 am
Hi, very nice information bout geolocation targeting. Thanks for that and Just supposed I’d let you know that your website is displaying weird in my K-melleon browser. Looks gr8 from what I can see though.
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