Geolocation SEO question

[raresn]

Hi everyone, i have a question regarding Google indexing of pages.

I'm in the following situation: We have a company website that's on a .ro (Romanian) domain, but the website is mainly targeted for UK, USA and Europe. The content on the entrance page is currently in english but the .htaccess is configured for /en/ and /ro/.

The problem: We've got a good position in google with the content in english but we realized that we also need a Romanian version. We don't want to loose our position in google for the website in english but we would also like to provide Romanian content and optimize it for Google.ro

The Question: A possibility we taught of is to target the content using Geolocation so that users from Romania will see the Romanian content and those outside Romania would see the english content, but we are not sure how google crawler would see it. Would it be possible for this to fix our problem without loosing on SEO? If not, what other solutions could there be?

Thanks

[GarryHillton]

Hey,
Google Webmaster Offers URL Parameters functions in which we can set parameters for preventing crawling of same contents on different URLs of websites.

[raresn]

Yes, i know that but that's not my problem. It all goes down to this: Is the google crawler affected by the geolocation or not? Essentially what i want is to have the same website with 2 different homepage on the TLD, depending where they're accessed from.

[Tiggerito]

You don't want to have one page dynamically show different content based on location. You don't know where the Google Crawler is coming from and which version it will see. I have a client that blocks certain products based on IP regions. Google is constantly dropping then re-finding those pages as it crawlers must be coming from all over the place.

In your situation I would keep the home page English and have subsequent pages go to pages in the appropriate language folders.

On all pages give people the option to switch languages. You can also use language based canonical tags to indicate they are translations.

You can mark up pages to indicate their language, but the last thing I read was Google decides language purely from the content at the moment. So that's not important.

Could you explain what your .htaccess file is doing. I would suspect it is something you don't want to do.

After saying that, ideally I would have the English on a .com domain and the .ro for the Romanian. This is because your .ro domain is fixed at targeting Romania and will perform better there. A .com domain can be set to target any region (say USA or UK) so you can have your two domains target different regional markets.

[gdwwm929]

you will have to prepare two kinds of language website