Mirror sites for different engines/regions

[MrLeN]

I've been thinking about mirroring a site for regional specific engines and having regional specific robots.txt's

What do you think about this..

website.com
---------------
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: Googlebot

website.co.uk
---------------
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: Googlebot_UK?

website.com.au
---------------
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: Googlebot_au?

Does anyone think this would be a good idea?

Also, I have a "?" after googlebot, because I am unsure whether google has a bot for .com.au sites or .co.uk sites etc..

MrLeN

[MrLeN]

I was just playing with the thought that it might be better to be getting clicks from all the regionl engines, instead of just google.com

For example. If I own website.com - I might want to get it listed on google.com.au, so I would register website.com.au as well. Then I would upload the website to the website.com.au version and would get business from Australia.

Currently, I cannot get business from Australia, because mywebsite.com is not listed at google.com.au

In theory, if I could do this, there would be no duplicate sites being spidered. If I can correctly identify the regional googlebots, then the websites would not be mirrored and would only be found on regional engines.

I could of course also, modify each website version, so that it has regional flags, prices, images etc..

In case I've confused you, I just want to state that I am not trying to spam or mirror my website. I just want to give it regional domains and allow people from those regions to purchase my products.

I wonder if it would be more profitable to have a website for every country/region, rather than just one website for a .com?

I'm going to look into this..

MrLeN

[Conficio]

Hi there,
save your time and money.

To the best of my knowledge there are no region specific bots, never seen any. The index that is build and the page rank for the pages are different for different regions.

For a start, buy the different domains and point them to the same webserver. If you want to do something for the regional recognition, find a way to have pages specific to the various countries. Recognize different shipping promotions to these countries, recognize specials according to their local holidays, ... (gives you a reason to include all the country specific keywords, with no SEO tricks needed). Nothing to Internet specific, just plain old marketing and it appeals not only to search engines, but also to humans.

If you really want to serve those countries, have different check-out paths and get a local physical addresses (receiving snail-mail; would probably require a local human being; their exist forwarding services which would scan and e-mail you everything) local telephone numbers (VOIP) and local e-mail addresses (set up a mail-server for the local domains).

In short don't think primarily about attracting the search engines attention from those regions. Rather think how you can serve the customer in those regions. The SE will take care of itself.

K<o>

[Conficio]

Ups,
didn't realize you are actually located down under.

Just get the domain and you should pop up. May be even the *.com site disappears instead.

A better approach is certainly to cater to the local customers at least in parts. this all can still run against the very same shopping cart.

If you really want to get sophisticated, you implement content negotiation based on the language preference. You present pages with the different spelling of words and expressions used in the different versions of the English language. Again, customer centric takes care of the SE as well.

K<o>

[MrLeN]

What I want to do is have a website for each country, because I have products that people can utilize world wide.

Also, I would like to put different prices on different websites for different countries.

However, if I mirror a site under different regional domains I'll most likely get banned.

But some search engines will only list you if you have a regional domain.

I'd like to build a website that will be found in

.com.au
.co.uk
.com
.etc

MrLeN

[Conficio]

Hi there,
I remember a discussion about the very topic. Here a few quick comments

• The getting banned for identical sites is a bit overblown (in my opinion). This topic applies to one (mostly long) page websites that are multiplied by the thousands (through some sort of MLM or affiliation scheme). A few up to a dozen similar sites? I doubt Google will ban you.
• It is relatively easy to make sure the site is not an identical copy, by [list:55863eba8b]
• adding a regional address and phone number on every page
• adding a few regionally relevant content pages
• rewriting the language to the various versions of English

Please recognize that all these add-ons are not only helpful for the search engine but also for the human users and you can easily plead with Google that this is well intentioned and get "white listed" if ever needed.[*]If you have prices in local currency it makes an e-commerce site already different.[/list:u:55863eba8b]

I hope that helps you along.

K<o>