OK. This problem is doing my head in. And I don’t know if there even IS a definitive answer.
We have a website, lets call it mycompany.com. It’s a UK-based site, with UK based content. Google knows about it, and we have done a load of SEO on it. All is well.
Except, we are about to relaunch my company, the GLOBAL brand, so we now need mycompany.com/uk, mycompany.com/us, and mycompany.com/au, for the various countries local content. We are using GEOIP, so if someone from the US loads mycompany.com, they get redirected to mycompany.com/us etc.
If someone isn’t in one of those three countries (US, Australia, or UK) they get the UK site.
This is all well and good, but we dont want to lose the rather large amount of Google juice we have on mycompany.com! And worse, the Google bot appears to be 100% based in the US, so the US site (which is pretty much out LEAST important one of the three) will appear to be the main one.
We have thought about detecting the bot, and serving UK content, but it appears Google may smack us for that.
Has anyone else come across this situation, and have a solution?
As long as Google can find mycompany.com/uk and mycompany.com/au, it’ll index all three versions of the site. Your domain’s Google juice should apply to all three URLs just fine if they’re on the same domain.