Geotargetted Redirects? - Irish SEO, Marketing & Webmaster Discussion

blacknight · #1 (**permalink**) 06-08-2006, 12:41 PM

Has anyone got any experience in setting up geoip based redirects?

One of the things that concerns me is that Google, Yahoo and most of the other spiders use US IPs, so they could get redirected to the US version of the site and not "see" the other versions..

Any thoughts?

louie · #2 (**permalink**) 06-08-2006, 02:32 PM

you can use (in php)

$ip = getenv ( "REMOTE_ADDR" ); # get IP address
$ip_name = gethostbyaddr ( $ip );

that will give you:

089-101-116088.ntlworld.ie
089-101-116088.ntlworld.ie

or you can use IP2country database

blacknight · #3 (**permalink**) 06-08-2006, 02:41 PM

I'm not too worried about the database side of it as we have a maxmind subscription.. what I am worried about is getting round sending spiders to the wrong location

louie · #4 (**permalink**) 06-08-2006, 03:06 PM

spiders doesn't like redirection, but they are reconised as crawlers, either by coming from robots.txt file or the "agent" tag: Crawlers, Agents, Bots, Robots and Spiders so you can do your redirection based on that

How to identify search engine spiders and webbots

RedCardinal · #5 (**permalink**) 06-08-2006, 03:47 PM

And most of all take care not to do anything that might appear like cloaking or you run the risk of getting bowled.

I presume Aer Lingus has you thinking about this

WRT letting SE's see other versions of site, why not simply use internal linking and they will crawl the other versions? There's a good chance the SE's will be able to figure out which content is most applicable.

Are you going to have multiple content on each URI or are you going to redirect to multiple URIs based on geotargeting (country in the query string or something similar)?

blacknight · #6 (**permalink**) 06-08-2006, 03:57 PM

The Aer Lingus fiasco is an aside

Basically what I want to do is setup something like shop.domain.tld and based on the user's ip redirect them to the correct Amazon version.

For example, if the user has a US IP they would see .com content, whereas a user from a German speaking country would get the .de content. I'd also have links to the other versions on the page so that users could choose to use a different version if they wanted...

Does that make sense?

louie · #7 (**permalink**) 06-08-2006, 04:01 PM

Would you not be better off having a select menu at the top of the page to go to different domains.

There is an example: www.alpine.com

this way you don't break any rules and search engine can spiders all of them having the links properly displayed.

blacknight · #8 (**permalink**) 06-08-2006, 04:04 PM

The problem is that forcing a user to select from a menu makes them work, so you are less likely to make a sale

RedCardinal · #9 (**permalink**) 06-08-2006, 04:11 PM

Sorry wasn't getting the full picture.

Then probably just create your content with geotargeted results and just let the spiders crawl the different versions via whatever links you use between the different versions. Visitors get redirected to whatever content suits them based on their IP.

Make sure whatever linking method you use is spiderable (drop-downs with javascript redirects to be avoided if possible). Footer links like on amazon.com would be best for spiders.

If your pages are only going to contain scrapped amazon items then you are probably never going to rank to well in the SE's unless you can gather a pretty (read: seriously) large amount of backlinks to those subdomains and internal pages.

Tough one from an SEO perspective.

blacknight · #10 (**permalink**) 06-08-2006, 04:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rgh

If your pages are only going to contain scrapped amazon items then you are probably never going to rank to well in the SE's unless you can gather a pretty (read: seriously) large amount of backlinks to those subdomains and internal pages.

Tough one from an SEO perspective.

The script I'm using is pretty good at giving each section a unique enough URI, so I haven't been penalised as yet. In fact my earnings have been climbing very nicely

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