3 replies to this topic

[truegrit]

We are changing our site from a general .com site to using .com for the US and .ca for Canada. Also, some of the content will be generated from Java servlets and have the .do extension instead of .html. The servlets will detect the old URLs (with .html) and send a 302 redirect to the new content (produced by the servlets). When it does the redirect, it will examine the IP of the user and if it is a Canadian IP, it will send the user to the .ca site, if not, it will send the user to the .com site. The .ca domain has been around for a while but simply redirects to the .com site.

Will the .ca site be subject to Google's aging delay?

Also, is there a different Google crawler for Google Canada and a different crawler for Google (.com)?

[Randy]

Welcome truegrit !

I'm not sure if the aging delay is now affecting .ca domains. I don't have any so will leave that question to others who will know better.

The problem I see with the spiders is that Googlebot will be coming from a US-based IP number, so they're not going to see the redirects. This doesn't necessarily mean they won't see the .ca domain, because they will as long as you have some nice clean links pointing to it. But you'll want to be careful with directing all traffic based solely upon the IP number. In other words, redirecting Canadian traffic from the .com to the .ca is okay, though the spiders won't see these. But I don't think you'll want to redirect from the .ca to the .com if it's not a Canadian IP number, because if you do you're basically going to be blocking all of the major spiders from the .ca domain.

[truegrit]

Thanks. I won't be redirecting from .ca to .com because the .ca is a new site. The purpose of the redirect is so old Google links and old bookmarks continue to work. The redirects will be to new content. So the following redirects are possible:

If user IP is Canadian and page is .html, redirect from .com to servlets on .ca
If user IP is NOT Canadian and page is .html, redirect from .com to servlets on .com

The .html content actually won't exist on the .ca site.

[Randy]

Okay, you'll be okay with the spiders then.

One thing to be aware of though, sort of related to your question but not really...

Please realize that by changing all of the URIs you're going to stand a very good chance of losing some rankings and traffic for a time. Since the old pages will no longer exist it'll take some time for the spiders to crawl the new URLs and get them settled into the index. A pretty typical time frame for things to settle back in is 4-6 months when you're doing mass changes like this.