Is changing the language of page titles based on the user's IP considered cloaking?

[agapitoflores001]

It is nice to know it works that way. At least I was enlightened about this issue.

[splitkostanjeuma]

Well I'm not from a native English speaking country but I still want youtube to be in English. How do I change the settings so that I can view youtube pages in English?

[mrcakey]

Just back online! Thanks Matt, great answer.

The question arose as I have a site I'd like to do well internationally. By altering the language content locally I was hoping to rank on Google's foreign indexes but your answer suggests that - as I suspected - Googlebot will see only the version returned for US customers.

Anyone any suggestions for (legitimately) ranking for relevant terms on e.g. Google.de?

[rdsegan]

I have a question:

Let's take for example UK and US websites.

I have 2 domains, one with .co.uk to cater UK market and .com to cater US traffic.

Both contents are same with identical design and codes and in English language since both countries shares the same language as their main.

Will I get any duplicate content issue if I assign .co.uk site to UK and .com to US where both sites have identical contents.

Please advice.

Thank you in advance for your help.

[NoirNG]

Well seeing as IPv6 is there, and since it's 2011, geotargeting based on IPv4 addresses is just plain wrong. There are much better ways to detect what the client's language preference and locale data is.

[incrediblehelp]

Then what are you to do about paid content versus free content? If you want the paid content to rank at all?

[onreact]

Changing content based on the IP is a very bad user experience for many users. For instance many people would want to use Google.com in English but what they get is say Google.de in Germany with results in German.

So changing the interface language without asking for permission is a bad practice.

[calebtheredwood]

Great question(s). Very interesting about the US only bots.

[chiefra]

Thank you Matt, it is! (helping)

[bayXSonic]

Watch out people, this practice will only bring English pages to SERPs, so even if you have localized content, it will not show up for localized search words.

If you want to offer some kind of automatic redirection, use the Accept-Language header field. I've used it and it works perfectly with Google.

[RackNineInc]

@bayXSonic

Great piece of advice, bayXSonic

I looked into many other alternatives, but the Accept-Language seems the best by far.

Thanks a lot.

[gfdweb]

I just read the latest 'Google's Webmaster Blog about the new changes to the algorithm .It was a bit vague but I got the general jist of it. It would really help us allot to expand on it more and make it real clear about what you mean by "informational websites" being given higher PR. I run several commercial sites where I not only sell a service but also offer allot of good information. what to expect?

Thanks for all the info you guys share here on You Tube it has been allot of help!

[anatolian20]

I think this means that googlebot will crawl the English pages only bcoz of geo-location. its impossible for it to crawl the pages written in any languages other than English. if this is true, i did not like that.

[AE117]

@anatolian20 I believe what he was trying to say was that it crawls the site from a US ip address not that if its not in English it wont crawl. Google can translate and understand languages but it just sees that content from a US ip address it would be the same as me located in the US speaking both English and Spanish viewing a website written in Spanish, I can still understand the content even though I am not located in Mexico. Sorry if this does not make sense.

[tylerplack]

How is cloaking detected?

[IamTheEddy]

@tylerplack This would be a good question to submit :D

[bigal21110]

@tylerplack client side if\else statements

[IgorHW]

@tylerplack I presume they compare what your website responds when they access it as GoogleBot with response when they access it "unofficially" from other IP address and other user agent string.

[NoirNG]

If you automagically show users the right language content and do not redirect them to a URL that allows them to force a specific language (like Wikipedia does, for example: en -DOT- wikipedia -DOT- org, de -DOT- wikipedia -DOT- org...), only your English content will be indexed, as it is the only thing Google will know about. Same for any other version of the website based on the client user agent or IP, you have to put it in the URL.

[50kT]

yay! im the first!

I wanna use this opportunity to say that Google slapped my site down to page 10! YAY I SUCK AT SEO WOOHOO!! I"M TOO SPAMMY PROBABLY!! YAY TIME TO USE ADWORDS :D

PS :.c