cmav | SEO Forum

Mar 22, 2021

Incorrect Homepage on International site

cmav replied to thread Incorrect Homepage on International site

Just to follow up on my last comment.

Do I need to create an actual html page for my root domain specifically to take care of Google Crawler so it doesnt scrape title and description from its IP redirected page (ie German)? (seems like a black hat technique but checking anyway)

Incorrect Homepage on International site

cmav replied to thread Incorrect Homepage on International site

Thanks for your response.

I'm basically trying to figure how to stop Google UK displaying as its first result our root domain www.domain.com which has been indexed with a German title and German description (same thing happens for Italian Google users in Italy and so forth)

How do I stop result occurring in Google? This must be a common issue for multi country sites where there is an IP redirect from the root domain?

Thanks

Mar 19, 2021

Incorrect Homepage on International site

cmav published thread Incorrect Homepage on International site

Hi,

I have an international site with 32 country homepages within the same domain: eg

www.domain.com/en-gb/ www.domain.com/fr-fr/ www.domain.com/de-de/ www.domain.com/e-es/ and so forth

We use IP redirection on the root www.domain.com (which has no HTML page of its own) to divert the user to their relevant country homepage.

Within each country homepage <head> we include:

a canonical link to itself
hreflang alternates to all instances of other homepages including itself
x-default to root www.domain.com

Our Google Crawl bot is Germany located and as I understand when Google crawls our root domain it takes the title and description from its destination url which in crawlbots case is www.domain.com/de-de/

What is the problem I am trying to solve?

Every variation of local Google (eg UK/FR/IT/US) displays at the top of the results this root domain with German title/description

I want Google UK to display www.domain.com/en-gb/, Google Italy to display www.domain.com/it-it/ and so forth

How can I stop Google showing this German titled "page"? Should we switch off ip redirect for crawlbot? Do we need to add a HTML page to root www.domain.com specifically for crawlbot? Are these alternate and canonical flags added not enough for Google?

Thanks