The Core

So in my spare (!!)  time I like to help out a network of meditation centers.  I was hoping you guys could help me out as I'm not too well versed in IP targetting and Geolocation issues.

Here's the scenario.  This is for their book publishing site. 

"Currently, the site is setup with the following format:

    tharpa.com/country/book

Which means that right now Tharpas UK & US need unique URLs to promote common book content.

However, we'd like one common URL for publicity and promotion purposes that would lead people to their respective country (i.e. UK or US). For example, we could have a URL such as tharpa.com/esh (for Eight Steps to Happiness) and then when people typed this in they would automatically be redirected to tharpa.com/uk/esh or tharpa.com/us/esh.

Therefore, tharpa.com/esh would have lots of content (videos, etc) and we would widely promote that URL in social media, SEO, press releases, Adwords, etc, but that page would be a redirect only. The question is: from an SEO perspective, will Google recognize our backlinks, keywords, etc, etc that point to a redirect-only page and give Tharpa credit for the content??"

The reason for doing it this way is that, to order a book, a customer must first select the country office that will fulfill the order. 

"We don't want to send people to a static stand-alone page, we want to send them to a fully functioning website. And the website only really functions if people see prices in their currency, etc. If they have to choose their country, it's not seemless or ideal."

I would really appreciate any info/heads up/leads you guys could offer.  Thanks!

I should add that I've not deployed this approach yet so take the above as theoretical.  I do intend to test it though, so should have some results in the next few months that I can share.

Adam thanks so much for this answer, I really appreciate it!  It's exactly what we were looking for.

Now I only have one final question.

If we create a page called tharpa.com/us/esh

This will be a page used for offline advertising.  Our goal would be to use IP sniffing so that, based on a user's IP, they will get the relevant country site.

Do you know the best way to do this?  I realize this is a very basic question but I am not a programmer and don't know anything about IP sniffing etc.  So perhaps this is a "IP delivery" 101 question?  Either way, what is the best way to do this?  And would that page be a 301 redirect to the relevant page based on the user's country IP?

THANKS AGAIN I really appreciate your help!

I'd tend to agree with Bill's sentiment here, but there are plenty of examples of sites that do this.

One thing to consider is that most major SE spiders crawl from IP addresses that map to the US, so if you want them to crawl your non-US content you'll need to let them at it somehow.