GeoLocation forwarding on international sites and Bing

T

TurboTom

Currently if you search Bing (regardless of whether you filter on the UK or
not) you will get a link to the US version of our web site at the top of the
search results (http://www.XXXX/us). This is bad news for us, since our
customer base is 98% UK based and the US site is a fledgling recently
launched.

We have 3 sites:
XXXXX/uk
XXXXX/us
XXXXX.com.au

In order to geo-locate our customers to the right web site we have a site
selector page at
www.XXXXXX.com

This uses geo-location software to lookup the IP number and direct to the
appropriate site. Since the Bing bot is clearly US based it appears to have
assumed that the US site is our primary one, as this is where it will have
been directed to. It is most emphatically not.

Because of the penalties for attempting to hookwink search engine Bots, we
have made no attempt to route the Bing bot to the UK site. There are links
from the US site, but these are obviously not ranked well compared to
www.XXXXX.com/us

I have found Bing’s webmaster tools and am in the process of validating the
sites, but as far as I can see there are no geo-targetting options as there
are in Google, and until we can work this out we’re going to have a lot of
confused customers.

Is there any advice on how we can fix this, at least for UK internet
searches, if not international ones?
 
A

Adrienne Boswell

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed =?Utf-8?B?VHVyYm9Ub20=?=
Currently if you search Bing (regardless of whether you filter on the
UK or not) you will get a link to the US version of our web site at
the top of the search results (http://www.XXXX/us). This is bad news
for us, since our customer base is 98% UK based and the US site is a
fledgling recently launched.

We have 3 sites:
XXXXX/uk
XXXXX/us
XXXXX.com.au

Please use example.com. It is reserved for that use, see
http://example.com or http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt
In order to geo-locate our customers to the right web site we have a
site selector page at
www.XXXXXX.com

This uses geo-location software to lookup the IP number and direct to
the appropriate site. Since the Bing bot is clearly US based it
appears to have assumed that the US site is our primary one, as this
is where it will have been directed to. It is most emphatically not.

Because of the penalties for attempting to hookwink search engine
Bots, we have made no attempt to route the Bing bot to the UK site.
There are links from the US site, but these are obviously not ranked
well compared to www.XXXXX.com/us

I have found Bing’s webmaster tools and am in the process of
validating the sites, but as far as I can see there are no
geo-targetting options as there are in Google, and until we can work
this out we’re going to have a lot of confused customers.

Is there any advice on how we can fix this, at least for UK internet
searches, if not international ones?

You could look for Bing's UA string and redirect to the .uk site. I
would use a 301, moved permanently:

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://example.com/uk/"
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Members online

No members online now.

Forum statistics

Threads
473,744
Messages
2,569,483
Members
44,902
Latest member
Elena68X5

Latest Threads

Top