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
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
I would not mess with the redirection based on GEO IP. It is very easy for things to go wrong. In general, why do you want to control Googlebot? I think all you need is to give your visitors the right way to go.
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
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)
