How will geo-ip redirects affect which geo-targeted pages Google indexes?

How will geo-ip redirects affect which geo-targeted pages Google indexes? - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the How will geo-ip redirects affect which geo-targeted pages Google indexes? error on your web browser. Problem :

We are an Indian company and have an online store. We sell in India as well as abroad. The products are sold at different prices in India and abroad and there are two site versions for Indian prices and International prices as www.example.com and www.example.com/international/ respectively.

URLs of both versions are submitted to Google and IP based redirection is applied through PHP code to all URLs of both types as below:

• If a URL www.example.com/international/xyz-123.html is opened in India then it redirects to www.example.com/xyz-123.html




• If a URL www.example.com/xyz-123.html is opened in a country outside India then it redirects to www.example.com/international/xyz-123.html

Now we know that if URL A redirects to URL B then Google Indexes URL B.

Given the above rule we understand that:

• when www.example.com/xyz-123.html is crawled by Google say in US, it will redirect it to www.example.com/international/xyz-123.html and this will get indexed instead of
  www.example.com/xyz-123.html.




• When www.example.com/international/xyz-123.html is crawled by Google in India, it will redirect it to www.example.com/xyz-123.html and this will get indexed instead of www.example.com/international/xyz-123.html

Will the above scenario eventually lead Google to index both www.example.com/xyz-123.html and www.example.com/international/xyz-123.html or will Google not index either of the URLs?

Solution :

Your indexing is going to be spotty. Google may index some of both sites. It will index mostly your international site because Google does most of its crawling from the US.

Auto-redirection based on geo-IP address or the Accept-Language header hurts SEO. If you want good SEO, you can't use redirects. Google crawls from all over the world. It expects to be able to access the international site from India and the India site from the rest of the world. Pages will fall out of the index when Googlebot gets redirects.

If you use IP detection, instead of using a redirect, you can put a notice on the site saying "You look like you are in India, click here to use the India website with pricing in Indian currency." Instead of IP address detection, you can also use the Accept-Language header which is sent by browsers, or browser features that allow you to access the users location. But again, don't issue redirects.

Even for users, redirects are not good:

• Geo IP databases are inaccurate. Up to 10% of users could be identified as being in the wrong location.


• People travel. Just because somebody is currently in a location, it doesn't mean that you can always make the right choice for them.


• The Accept-Language header is usually not customized by the user. The default is usually based on the language of the browser that is installed. The country may be totally incorrect. Even the language may be wrong because browser downloads tend to default to English.


• Users may use VPNs and proxy servers.


• Many users won't grant your site permission to use their location data.

Because of these problems, it is better to give the user a notice and let them make their own decision.

It's not certain that Google would index the redirect, it would depend a lot on the canonical URL that is set up on both pages.

In your scenario, this is a single site with a folder holding the International variation of product pages existing on the site.

You're going to want to provide a canonical on both of the pages specifying which URL the crawler should take as primary. My assumption is that it would be the non-international version.

With multiple-region site, it contains multiple versions of same content with slight variants, violate google penalty for duplicate content, and may potentially impact SEO. In this case, it is important to tell google your multiple-regional site structure and make search engine crawlers understand the pages relevant to certain regions. Thus, google can rank only the relevant pages in search results for your visitors from different regions.

You can use hreflang tag to set multi-regional site structure. As you are using different subdomains, here are examples for your default international market, and Indian market:

<link rel="alternate" href="www.example.com/intetnational" hreflang="x-default" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.example.com" hreflang="en-in" />

Hope it helps!

We hope that this article has helped you resolve the google, redirects, search-engine-indexing error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!