Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We have 2 domains - .ca and .com. Both have identical content, with the exception being pricing and some key shipping information.
We run a perl based site, using a geo-ip redirect and cookies to deal with serving up the right site to the right country.
I'm changing this current setup to use folders for country specific versions. ie. Canada visitors (.ca) will get redirected to .com/cdn/ instead of just giving them the .ca version.
We previously had a robots.txt ban on the .ca, as we didn't want to run into any dup content problems. Part of the changes will include putting a 301 moved permanently to the .com/cdn, and removing this robots.txt ban and allowing all engines to crawl and index.
The reason I want to make these changes is to increase our google.ca rankings. We used to rank very well, but since G has made all the geo changes, we've pretty much fallen off the map, depsite having great rankings on google.com.
Anyways I'm hoping I can get some feedback from you all on the proposed changes, before we go to all the effort and cost.
Do you think this will have any impact on our google.ca rankings? Is there a better way to deal with this?
Thanks guys.
using a geo-ip redirect and cookies to deal with serving up the right site to the right country.
How does googlebot get treated in this system, with it's US-based IP address?
Our previous system would have given it .ca if coming from canada, or .com if US. This sucked, because we had a no index ban on .ca.
Do you know if any of G's bots are using Canadian IPs?
I'm not a fan of geo-IP detection and redirection. First, I think it frustrates many users when they travel, or when their ISP is not in the same country as they are - and that can happen for several reasons. Second I've heard too many reports of search engine troubles.
I think you're much better off to give the visitor the controls, by offering a clear navigational choice to the other site and not bothering with the IP detection.
When it comes to the near-duplicate content issue, I suggest you let Google filter out the appropriate search result for each user. Your .ca urls should end up ranking on google.ca (or for google.com visitors on a Canadian ISP) and getting filtered out for the rest of the world.
How would you guys handle this, given the content is not unique?
.ca, or .com/cdn/?
As for the cookies and geo ip redirection, we sorta have to do this as other wise customers wind up ordering from the wrong site. I don't think this should be a problem as there are 2 basic senarios - 1 you are in canada and get the .com/cdn, you are anywhere else in the world, you get the .com. Google does it, so why not us. :-)
I'm not going to beat a dead horse on the geo-redirection schema, but for this change, definitely think about how your server will treat googlebot. Up to now you had a robots.txt disallow rule on the .ca domain. But for it to rank on google.ca in the future, Google needs to be able to spider it and not get redirected to your .com domain.
In researching this I looked at how most other large sites are dealing with there country specific sites, and 9/10 are doing it with folders, not TLD, so that's why I used this for us. Also it's a 301, not a redirect - isn't there a difference?
Looking at how others are doing things is helpful if you have access to the data about how well their approach is working for them. IMO, the apparent hassle of hosting in the appropriate country is well worth it.
As for separate hosting etc, what are your thoughts on the dup content issue with respect to this? Do you think the dup content will eliminate any chance of ranking on google.ca?
