1

So i have a woocommerce setup on AWS that currently provides fulfillment to Country A

Now, i want to expand my services to Country B.

The site of country A will not not have any common urls from the site of Country B.

I know that there are better approaches like using subdomain for each country, but i have a lot of premium plugins and want to save on licenses. To tackle this, this is my approach:

  • Setup two servers - clone of each other
  • Use geolocation routing on route 53 to redirect visitors from specific countries to specific servers

With this approach, domain name remains unchanged, hence no problem of plugin license issues. Also, i can take care of any onsite technical problems. Infact I tested it and it works

Now my main concern is SEO.

How will google handle this for indexing ?

A url from server A won't show up on Server B. What happens then ?

I don't know what to ask, but i think you understood my problem, so please enlighten me. I couldn't find any documentation regarding this approach but i know websites like netflix do it.

Thanks for your time reading this <3

Subrata Rabidas
  • 11
  • 1

1 Answers1

1

Google won't be able to index your site. Googlebot will encounter tons of errors when trying to crawl your site. To get good SEO:

  • The URLs for the different country content need to be different (including the home page.)
  • All content for both countries needs to be accessible from around the world.

This is because Googlebot does not crawl content for a country from that country itself. Google has data centers around the world, and Googlebot may try to access any of your content from any of them. Googlebot is going to encounter errors half the time when it contacts the wrong server for the wrong content. Your content isn't going to be able to be indexed if your servers gives Googlebot an error half the time.

Basing localization on the URL path rather than on a subdomain can work well for SEO. See How should I structure my URLs for both SEO and localization? I would recommend using a subdirectory URL structure. All the content for country 1 would go in example.com/xx/ and all the content for country 2 would go in example.com/xy/.

The example.com/ home page could detect which country the user is from and redirect to the appropriate home page. If the visitor is not from one of those countries, or looks like a bot, it should show a page giving the user two links so they can choose the country.

That means that both your servers need to be able to show all the content for both countries. It would be still be possible to have two servers with separate content as you describe, but you would need to configure each of them to reverse proxy the content from the other server in cases where they get requests for content from the other country.

It is more common to solve this problem in other ways:

  • Use a single central server and use a content delivery network (CDN) with caching to make the requests faster in the respective countries.
  • Use separate subdomains or domains for the different content and pay the additional licensing fees for using multiple copies of any software.
Stephen Ostermiller
  • 98,758
  • 18
  • 137
  • 361