Is there an issue redirecting my homepage based on IP to a subdomain?

Question

I have a website with .com domain. www.example.com. At the moment it's primarily focussed on the UK. However I've been trying to work out how to cope with expanding to the US/EU without having to migrate the existing site to .co.uk and put the US site on .com.

my current idea is to have
uk.example.com
us.example.com
example.fr
example.de

then have the following rules:

1.example.co.uk redirects to uk.example.com
2.geotarget visitors to example.com to us.example.com / uk.example.com or example.fr
3. geotarget deep links from SERPS/existing backlinks with overlay with link to correct site (ala amazon)

Is there an issue with redirecting in rule 2 from an seo point of view? I'm just not sure how to treat the mainhome page 'www.example.com' in such a setup.

Thanks

Answer 1

You should be using a "301 moved permanently" in order to carry your SEO value with you. What you want is a "canonical name".

See: SEO advice: url canonicalization

Answer 2

The main issue with redirecting users via geotargetting is how you will handle the Search Engine 'Bots coming to your site. ie: If Googlebot's IP originates in California it will be redirected to us.example.com, and believe that this is the primary top level site (which it may or may not be).

Ideally, you exclude all SE Bots from the geo-targetted-redirection (either by knowing their IP address or their User Agent string), and present them with a splash or landing page that links to each sub-site.

Welcome to Example.com! Please choose your country to proceed

• United States

• United Kingdom

• France

• Germany