Google Search Luxury womenswear

How we fixed the geo-redirect hiding Ellery's local sites from Google

Ellery ran localised sites for Australia, Europe and the US, but Google kept serving the US version everywhere. Two technical fixes later, each market sees the right site.

I Want Results Like This Fixed straight away
Garment racks in an Ellery fashion showroom
3Localised sites correctedAustralia, Europe and US
3Steps to fix itRolled out immediately
#1Right site for brand searchIn each market
01

The problem

Ellery is a luxury womenswear label born in Australia and now trading out of Sydney, Europe and the USA, with a localised version of the website for each market. That setup was working against them in search. Google couldn't work out which site belonged to which country, so Australians searching the brand were landing on the US store, and the other markets had the same problem.

The team had already tried to sort it out internally, then with other SEO consultants, and the wrong sites kept showing. By the time Ellery came to us the brief was narrow and urgent: find what was confusing Google and make it stop.

What we were up againstGoogle serving the US site to Australian searchersThe same confusion across the European marketPrevious internal and agency attempts had failed
A brand search from Australia before the fix: the US store was showing as the official website.
A brand search from Australia before the fix: the US store was showing as the official website.
02

What we did

We started with a full crawl of all three sites and a hands-on read of the code. Two faults surfaced. The hreflang tags pointed every page back to the home page rather than its own equivalent, and an automatic geo-redirect was bouncing visitors to the site for their region. That second one mattered most, because Googlebot crawls from the US.

1Crawled and audited all three sitesA site crawl and a manual review of the code showed us how the localised versions were wired together, and where that wiring broke.
2Confirmed the redirect was the culpritWhenever Googlebot visited the Australian or European site it was redirected to the US version. We fetched as Googlebot in Search Console with a parameter that bypassed the redirect, and the correct site came back straight away.
3Fixed hreflang to reference full URLsEach page now points to its true equivalent on the other sites, not the home page, so Google can pair them correctly.
4Let Googlebot through the geo-redirectThe redirect plugin was set to exempt Googlebot, so each localised site could be crawled as itself.
5Asked Google to reindexWith both fixes live, we requested a fresh crawl of all three sites through Search Console.
03

The results

The problems were purely technical and, once identified, quick to fix. Our three-step solution took effect immediately: the correct localised site now shows for brand searches in each market, where other consultants had not found the cause.

The same brand search after the fix: ellery.com's official site back in place for Australian searchers.
The same brand search after the fix: ellery.com's official site back in place for Australian searchers.

With the fixes in place, each market's site can be crawled and ranked on its own merits as Ellery keeps growing across Australia, Europe and the US.

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