Geolocation can also be helpful in detecting click fraud. If you sell products or services in only one country you could filter out clicks coming from other countries.

Regarding the issue of companies pushing visitors off to regional sites. In the whitepaper, John Yunker cites as a best practice that companies should always have a backup “global gateway” strategy in place to give users the ability to self-select their location, if needed. The global gateway should be highly visible and easy to use and it must allow the Web user to be and feel fully in control of selecting his or her language and country.

Also a company doesn’t necessarily have to redirect Web users based on their country of origin. You can simply localize a bit of content here and there just to be sure
your customers are finding their way.

Kerry Langstaff
Vice President Marketing, Quova. Inc.
klangstaff@quova.com

I think having sections of the site via folders or sub-domains, or even separate country level domain names, dedicated to the other languages would be the way to go and use the IP targeting to provide a “suggestion” to link over to the other locations should the visitor land in the wrong location to start with. Or use country flag links that point to the other locations.

Do let those other locations get crawled by the bots to increase the likelihood that a searcher lands at the right location to begin with.

If your geo-location system is automatically redirecting visitors, by IP, to their personalized location you do solve the one problem of sending them to where they need to be. BUT, if poorly executed, you open yourself up to a whole host of problems that can cut down drastically on the full potential you could be achieving out of search engine traffic.

Like you just said above Patrick, “the whole area is tricky!”

The whole area is very tricky!

But how would Geolocation help in SEO? Which page or version of a site is shown for a Search Bot visiting the site? If a version of site is dependent on a ip address, wouldn’t the other versions be ignored by search bot?

Few of my thoughts which could be implemented if you or your client is expanding Worldwide/Europe, whilst Geolocation helps in large extend you might want to consider this.

Ideally, to have as good a chance of ranking well in natural results as possible, a site should be,

• hosted in the target country
• have a domain name with a local TLD i.e. .fr, .de, etc.,
• be fully translated into the local language to offer as many chances as possible to rank for pertinent search terms in the local country
• have links from sites with the same TLD

Let domain.com domain be used and the content for each market placed into a folder structure i.e. the content for French users would be placed in domain.com/fr.

This might be suitable for Small Business while the E-Commerce giants might go for Geolocation.

Few of Corporate Landing Pages you might want to have a look before your decide on your site.

- http://www.xerox.com/ (Visitors select their region)
- http://www.ebay.com/ (Visitors are prompted based on IP)
- http://www.amazon.com/ (Visitors are prompted based on IP)
- http://www.ibm.com/ (Visitors land on US version but have options to change Country/Region)

In my opinion, eBay & Amazon have implemented an interesting landing page for visitors. Users with proxy (using IP from different country) might not want to land in different page, loading the page they requested and suggesting to move to appropriate Country/Region specific section would be more recommended.

I am sure the Geolocation would be largely used in future as brands and etailers start to expand and attract local markets. Thanks again for contributing this interesting article & linking to download the white paper which I am sure will help us to great extend.

Cheers,
Vinay

It has to be handled very careful to provide a good user experience.

For instance, I often find that most hardware manufacturers have regional sites, but that most of the firmware updates only ever appear on their USA site. So when you get pushed off to a regional site you have to try and navigate your way back to the parent. Basically, most regional sites are very sub-standard.

Another poor example is eBay. Every time I visit the USA site and I want to search for something it pops up telling me I really want to use the UK site instead. Once or twice at most should be enough to tell it that no, I actually want to use the USA site, I’m not being a tard.

A good example is Amazon. You almost always hit USA Amazon results in search engines, or follow a link from a blog. Amazon just gently reminds you at the top of the page that you can get the item from the UK site instead and links you to a search to find it.

Plus, IP geolocation always has a margin of error. I remember when I was in the DRM business (lolz) – it was an issue with AOL IPs. Wherever you are in the world they are flagged as USA IPs because AOL just has one enormous netblock.

How do Quova solve that?