Geolocation links - the SEO effect

What is the SEO effect on a geolocation link

[fpeters]

Hi all,

I am working on a ecommerce website with a lot of contacts to international suppliers and brands.
A new trend I'm seeing is that they're using so-called Smartlinks. Based on the geolocation of the user, they're redirected to a local domain.
This is perfect for the company and the user. A little less for SEO (I presume).

For instance;
on the facebook page of the Red Hot Chili Peppers [facebook.com ], they have a post about their latest album. Depending on the counrty that you're in, you're redirected to a shop in your country.

I'm wondering how this effects SEO. Google can't crawl all of FB ofcourse, but they use it on various domains as well.
My issue with this is that Google crawls a website from a specific location (let's say the UK) and will see the UK-based link. Not the other countries.

How you do feel about the use of Smarturls and how can/do SEO-ers profit from them?

[martinibuster]

The script drops a rel="nofollow" in the link. No SEO benefit there.

[fpeters]

Hi MartiniBuster,

Thanks for the reply. In this case it has a nofollow indeed. But what if the link has a follow?

[martinibuster]

There is no such thing as a geolocation of a link. A link does not have the property of geolocation. When you discuss geolocation of a link, what you're really discussing is the geographic location of a server or the country code associated with the domain name. And in the case of the ccTLD, the site itself could be hosted on a server with a different geolocation, in which case you would have two geolocational signals.

I have never read of an advantage or reason for identifying geolocation of a server or ccTLD within the context of link analysis or PageRank distribution. Can you? Current methods of using the language of the link is likely all that is needed.

[NickMNS]

I am not sure how the links your talking about work exactly. The link you pasted did not work for me. But here are something to consider.

1- Google generally crawls from a US ip so Google would only (mostly) see the US links. So Google may have trouble seeing the links that are not for US users.
2- I assume that the links must be generated with JS on the fly, that the links is generated only after the users location is detected. Again, Google can crawl JS that is rendered at page load but does not crawl JS that requires a user action. So again depending on exactly how the links are implemented Google may not see them at all.

If Google can find the link, and the link is followed, then I assume that it should behave and count like any other link.