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The Issue

We've got a ccTLD website (example.de) with subfolders for different languages, which obviously needs to be moved to example.com for proper language targeting. Since example.com belongs to the parent group company which has been 301ing all visitors to us-group.com so far and is reluctant to allow us 301ing example.de to example.com and ditch their existing 301s to us-group.com, we need to work around a bit.

The Task

Visitors from the North and South Americas should be rerouted to us-group.com Visitors from all remaining countries (such as Europe and South East Asia) should be redirected from example.de to example.com and stay there without being rerouted to us-group.com

The Challenge

We figured that many visitors from the Americas use proxies, so rerouting by IP might not be the best option. The us-group.com simply would lose a lot of their previous traffic.

Reroutings users by their browser language, however, might also not be very accurate, given that most English speaking users might not adjust their language by region such as US, AU, UK, CA ... because any English might be fine for them. Therefore, we would not be able to reroute CA and US users to us-group.com and still have UK and AU users stay at example.com/en/.

What other options do we have to reroute users with a PHP script? Would it make any sense to combine IP address and browser language detection? If so, how and what should be prioritised?

Is there anyone out there able to share similar experiences?

Additional thoughts: Obviously, that's not the only thing we consider doing. Before rerouting visitors from the Americas, we would:

  • modify the DNS settings of the example.com domain (A record: IP is going to be changed to the IP address of the German server)
  • modify the vhost record, so the German server redirects the example.com visitors to the directory example.com/en/ (containing the English parts of the content of example.de)
  • Reroute visitors from the Americas to the us-group.com (by browser & OS language, as mentioned above)

This post is linked to my initial question How to reroute to a different URL identifying browser and system language by PHP.

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tentaclequing
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  • Most of this seems to be a copy+paste of your first question, and the broad purpose seems to be the same. Are you looking for a different answer here? – halfer Mar 04 '15 at 13:01
  • Hi @halfer, thanks for referring back to me. Yes, I am indeed looking for a different answer here. When I asked this question for the first time, I wanted to know HOW to reroute via browser and system language, because I assumed this would be the most accurate option. Now I just hear that rerouting via system language might be impossible (unless the user is using IE), and that browser language based routing might not be that accurate. English as a browser language can refer to EN-CA, EN-US, etc. - I need to find out whether the user is from the UK or the US etc. to route them accordingly. – tentaclequing Mar 04 '15 at 13:13
  • You could use JavaScript to identify their timezone - doesn't give you a location unfortunately, but it might be a start. You should allow people to choose the site they go to, if you incorrectly auto-detect anyway. – halfer Mar 04 '15 at 13:26
  • Thank you. Time zone sounds interesting. Do you reckon this is more accurate than browser language? Could this probably be combined with browser language in any way, and does that even make sense? – tentaclequing Mar 04 '15 at 13:36
  • I've not tried it. If the browser sends a language request in the headers then you could combine it, and it's worth a try for a couple of hours, but I don't imagine it will be very accurate. JavaScript can be turned off, so that unreliability is also added. Since this feature is just to direct people to the right site, I'd not spend too much time on it. – halfer Mar 04 '15 at 13:40
  • Well, the issue is quite important. The client's head quarters in the US are currently using example.com, redirecting everyone from there to us-group.com. The head quarters in Germany claim the example.com, since they currently manage all other regions in the world through example.de/country/ which does not allow for proper geotargeting. Only if we can assure the US head quarters that users from the Americas will still be redirected (rerouted) to us-group.com, our client will be allowed to use example.com + country-specific directories. – tentaclequing Mar 04 '15 at 14:04
  • If you look at big multi-nationals, they just [put a country chooser](http://www.dell.com/) on their site. Do that on all your sites? – halfer Mar 04 '15 at 14:07
  • That's what I recommended in the first place, but they think this might not be the best choice UX wise. However, considering inaccuracy, I figure rerouting might be even worse UX wise. Thanks. – tentaclequing Mar 04 '15 at 14:21
  • You can still try auto-routing as well. If it is 80% accurate then that's great, but the country chooser is still necessary, as it is never be 100%. – halfer Mar 04 '15 at 14:29

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