View Full Version : Geo-Targeting
critter
08-23-2005, 10:44 AM
My company is thinking of doing Geotrageting – via IP locations.
For example we have a USA, Japanese, UK and French website. Depending on what IP they come from we would like to send them to the country specific website which better serves the users needs.
Is this considered to be cloaking in the eyes of Google?
Cheers
Critter
I have done this with a few clients - it's a legitimate form of redirection. Better to serve content this way than have duplicate content (my clients have UK, Canadian and US portals with essentially the same content).
There hasn't been any issues with cloaking.
dzine
08-23-2005, 11:47 AM
If you are not delivering some custom content to a search engine spider, it is not cloaking.
critter
08-23-2005, 02:37 PM
OK..
We actually have seperate sites for each of our multilingual/international brands......
All we are looking to do is geotraget our US site so if international/multilingual customers visit the US site we shall send them to the corresponding site. With that said, each site is obviously unique in it's content because its in the corresponding language and thus would translate differently.
We would like to keep our international sites, so its a question of whether we geotarget or put buttons on the US site for those international visitors..
I can't believe in a case like this G would impose a penatly - as this is a legitimate form of redirection/cloaking...as it makes our site(s) more useful to our visitors..
Critter
Critter
Incubator
08-23-2005, 02:52 PM
Google does it themselves...for example if I type in www.google.com (http://www.google.com) in my address bar I get automatically redirected to www.google.ca (http://www.google.ca) since Im in Canada.
As long as your not feeding content and directing them to the proper language site I cant see them have any issues
2 cents ......
INC
If you use the goe-targetting it won't matter - international clients should go to the corresponding international site based on IP..
As I said earlier, I have clients doing this exact thing and the ip recognition helps redirect to the proper content without them having to select a country.
Of course you may want to give them the option in case they do happen to find an english page and they are non-english - then they should be able to select the language they want.
The biggest reason we used ip recognition was because of the duplicate English content (and pricing issues - they sell products in different currencies)