GeoTargeting and Google

[Lynx]

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(wasn't sure whether to put this in the Affiliate Scripts, Web Design & General Help or Google forum)

I've come across a problem with an experiment I was trying out on one of my sites. This site is UK only and listed on the first page of both google.com and google.co.uk under some great keywords... but obviously I'm doing nothing with a hell of a lot of US traffic. So I added a GeoTargeting function that redirects US traffic to a US affiliate campaign.

This is the kinda redirect I'm using:-

global $country_code;

if ('US' == $country_code) {
header("Location: redirect.php?location=".$country_code); 
  exit;
}

Now my problem is that google has a US IP address and is now not spidering my website

Any ideas?

L.

[Brendon]

Couple of possibilities :

1) You need 2 layers of redirection; 1 for spiders, and 1 for users.

You need to get / build a list of spider IPs / UAs, and deliver them the whole site, them geo-locate users so they get the right content (might look spammy though, no matter how careful you are - despite SEs protestations, they can be quite touchy about IP / UA delivery, and aren't always good at spotting when you have a good reason to do it. Sometimes they do though)

2) Add a country switching option somewhere, so US users can choose to see US content, and get the US aff links. That might work better from the user POV, and shouldn't run any risk of upsetting an SE

[monty]

2) Add a country switching option somewhere, so US users can choose to see US content, and get the US aff links. That might work better from the user POV, and shouldn't run any risk of upsetting an SE

This should always be present, it enables people who are accessing the site from one country but ORIENTATED to another country to make full use of it.

Just because someone is acessing for the US doesn't mean they are not perhaps a UK person, with a UK home, UK credit card etc. Such people, away from their long term home country, are in many ways ideal web shoppers - they don't have the UK highstreet available to them, etc.

[deadgoodundies]

Also remeber that if you are using something like the free version of the maxmind GEOip database then all AOL visitors will look like they are coming from the USA no matter what country they are from, so you would need the paid version and even that isn't 100% and needs updating all the time.

[Tom]

I was going to suggest checking the user agent and if it looks like a browser then redirect to the US site, otherwise default to leaving as is. But having read the further comments i'd be tempted to leave out the redirection completely and just have a really big option to switch to the US site if the user appears to be connecting from America. Personally I hate it when sites try and guess what I want, it's better to leave the option to the user to select for themselves unless you are absolutely certain you will get it right.

Tom