how to get the googlebot to get the correct GEOIPed content!?

Question

OK. This problem is doing my head in. And I dont know if there even IS a definitive answer.

We have a website, lets call it mycompany.com. It's a UK-based site, with UK based content. Google knows about it, and we have done a load of SEO on it. All is well.

Except, we are about to relaunch my company, the GLOBAL brand, so we now need mycompany.com/uk, mycompany.com/us, and mycompany.com/au, for the various countries local content. We are using GEOIP, so if someone from the US loads mycompany.com, they get redirected to mycompany.com/us etc.

If someone isn't in one of those three countries (US, Australia, or UK) they get the UK site.

This is all well and good, but we dont want to loose the rather large amount of google juice we have on mycompany.com! And worse, the google bot appears to be 100% based in the US, so the US site (which is pretty much out LEAST important one of the three) will appear to be the main one.

We have thought about detecting the bot, and serving UK content, but it appears google may smack us for that.

Has anyone else come across this situation, and have a solution?

Answer 1

Have you thought about including links for different sites on the homepage? Google could follow those and index their content as well - in turn indexing the UK content.

Answer 2

As long as Google can find mycompany.com/uk and mycompany.com/au, it'll index all three versions of the site. Your domain's Google juice should apply to all three URLs just fine if they're on the same domain.

Answer 3

@ross: yes, we have links between the sites. It' just the home page, and which one comes up when someone searches for "my company" in google.

Thanks!

Answer 4

If you instead using uk.mycompany.com, us. mycompany.com etc, then you can register them with google webmaster tools and specifically tell google which country they are from.

This might still work with folders rather than subdomains, but I haven't tried it.

One way to get round that, thinking about it, would be to 301 redirect uk.mycompany.com to mycompany.com/uk, then you'd be telling Google, as well as keeping your existing structure.

Answer 5

Hi, google alerts just brought me to this thread.

The domain name that was previously used in your question is my blog and the domain name is not for sale.

Are you just using this as an example domain - for the purpose of this discussion only? The convention is to use example.com as it is reserved for this exact purpose.

Some clarification would be appreciated.