: 301 Redirects for regional variants of a homepage I am planning on implementing a website which has regional homepage variants. For Example: mycompany.com/europe mycompany.com/us The rest of the

@Rambettina238

First of all, you should use a 302 redirect for this, not 301. With a 301 redirect, you're telling search engines that your home page has moved permanently and that they should delist the original URL and instead list it under the target URL. A 302 redirect, on the other hand, is temporary: it tells search engines (and users) that they should go to another page for the content, but that the original URL is still the one they should keep in their index.

Second, you should follow Google's guidelines for multi-regional sites. In particular, I'd suggest using rel=alternate link tags to link your regional pages together, so that e.g. mycompany.com/europe might have the tag:

<link rel="alternate" href="/us" hreflang="en-US" />


while mycompany.com/us would have the tag:

<link rel="alternate" href="/europe" hreflang="en-EU" />


This should let Google know that those two pages are, in fact, regional variants of the same page. (Note: EU is an ISO 3166-1 exceptionally reserved code for the European Union. I don't know if Google actually recognizes it as a proper region code, but it's probably worth a try, at least.)

You may also want to include on all the regional main pages the tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="/" />


This tag will, in effect, tell Google that it shouldn't index the regional pages at all, but should just treat any links pointing to them as if they pointed to the main page. (Google might still show the regional variants specified via rel=alternate links in regionally tailored search results; I haven't really tested this properly, and their documentation hints at it but doesn't seem to outright say so.) Of course, you should only do this if the regional pages are essentially identical in content; if they each contain some unique content that users might want to search for, rel=canonical is probably not the right solution.

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@Samaraweera270

There are a couple of questions which answer some of the SEO points you raise.

I would say that your users will probably be confused by this strategy, and probably Google into the bargain, as I don't believe the bot will recognise your website as being multilingual.

I would suggest you use the ISO country codes in your urls e.g. example.com/en/ or en.example.com and keep the users within that url space while browsing, this is less confusing if they selected an alternate language on the homepage and will allow to to more easily expand your translated content in the future.

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