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

Purely from a ranking POV, is it worthwhile using the visitor's IP to change the title and heading of a page to the local language? Is this considered cloaking? And does Googlebot even have spiders that crawl from foreign IPs anyway? Mr Cakey, Manchester, UK

Russian subtitles translated by Mike Shakin.

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Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• seo
• cloaking

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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)