How should I serve different content based on user location?

[mountainash]

Hay Matt,

You missed answering the question "What's the best way to do this?". You explained how not to do it.

My suggestion would be to have unique URLs for each of your IP targeted iterations of your site and redirect the user based on their IP. If appropriate, offer a way for the user to get to the other iterations as IP geo-targeting is not aways very accurate.

[MegaLoMonkey]

How do you actually redirect the user based on IP (using Apache). Using a .htaccess file and re-write? - or redirect?

[mountainash]

Apache can do it if you have a set IP. But you would probably have to use a server-side language (ie. PHP) to take the IP from the request, check it against a geo lookup server and then do then have the server-side language do the redirect.

[MegaLoMonkey]

Thanks, I have an list of IP ranges from a country, and achieving in Apache would be more suitable for me. But I don't see how to preform the redirect? - I can block a range of IP's, or blanket redirect when a specific URL is requested, but can see how to be selective on Geo location using .htaccess.??? Confused! :)

[MegaLoMonkey]

Aha! - Thinking around the issue, I could perfom a blanket redirect using .htaccess, to a php page which filters (server side) , to the page/s I wish to serve to people in different contries. This way, I don't think I will be classed as cloaking, as the IP that googlebot has comefrom will indeed see the correct contenc. Does this make sense? - Now I just need to work out how to do the GeoLocate in a php page! - Any tips? :)

[MichaelDadona]

From the minute of 1.30, it's a very clear example between IP delivery and Cloaking.

What I've learned between cloaking, Geography or IP base delivery.

IP delivery is based on delivery content which based on IP content address.

Cloaking is showing different content to users than showing to googlebot. Cloaking is a type of IP delivery but not IP delivery is cloaking.

A type of IP delivery which is not cloaking is showing;

1. different content

2. different users

3. different countries.

[takeallfree]

our site is only available from US and Uk ip.

and we show under construction page to Asian IP so would google penalize our website

[Andbac]

I'd block googlebot from viewing it using robots.txt...

[RafaelMinuesa]

Thank you for the clarification.

For people who are still expressing their reservations, what Matt is basically saying is don't try to serve content to the Googlebot which is different from what regular users are getting.

That's cloaking, unless I got it all terribly wrong ...

Just a question, perhaps a bit off-topic:

From a SEO point of view, what is better, to use JavaScript for Geo-redirection or do the redirect on the server?

[AzizNatour]

thanks Matt, very helpful :)

[manfmnantucket]

oh, matt! I am ready to cry. Most googlebots use IPs located in Mountain View CA. Thus GOOG pollutes its index of any website that tries to improve user experience via geo-context IP Delivery. These all will present as sites 'about' CA.

The pollution also affects adsense, which will display ads for SFO on geo-sensitive sites. This likely loses GOOG $. One must special-case and risk penalty, or rework site 2 b text tree. its been that way for years!

[devji79]

Does GoogleBot scan from differing country IP addresses other than the US? If not, surely only the US version of your example site would get indexed. How would you index the other country's versions?

[finalwebsites]

all google bots are using a US IP address.