Google’s John Mueller responded to a question on Reddit about whether showing different content based on a site visitor’s IP address affected SEO. Your answer provided information about Google crawling and indexing.
Showing banners for specific countries
The person asking the question ran a website that wanted to display a side-by-side banner with country-specific content. His concern was how this might affect rankings in different countries.
Here is the question:
“I have a question about how content for different geoip effects for SEO?
Some marketers in my company ask me about placing a side banner for users of a certain geographic IP, for example, for UK visitors, they want to show a banner about the upcoming event in the UK ), but the main geographic for the website: USA.
Does it affect SEO for the overall website? How does Google rank this type of location? Is this some sort of cover-up (no intent to cheat Google’s systems)?”
John Mueller’s answer
The person who asked the question asked three questions and Mueller limited his answer to how it affects SEO.
Mueller responded:
“Google generally crawls from one location, and that’s the content that would be used for the search.
If you want something to be indexed, you have to make sure it’s shown there (or shown globally). The rest is up to you :-)”
Googlebot in general trace from US IP addresses and if it is geo-blocked by IP address, it will change to another country IP.
How Google ranks the sidebar
One of the unanswered questions was about how Google classifies “location” by which I assume the person means content located in the sidebar.
Here’s what they asked:
“How does Google rank this type of location?”
Assuming the person is asking how Google ranks content in a sidebar, the answer to that question is that Google identifies the main content of a page and pretty much ignores the non-main content for ranking.
We know that Google identifies the different sections of a web page and an example is provided in an interview with Google’s Martin Splitt. Splitt talked about how Google identifies the different parts of the web page, such as the main content, navigation, and other basic dishes, so that it can score different parts differently (“weighted” differently is how it describe).
Next, Google identifies where the main content of the page is located and summarizes it in what it called the Central Annotation. Martin said that the Central Annotation is an identification of what the subject is.
In the context of the Reddit question, Google would probably classify the sidebar banner as part of the main content and therefore not use it for ranking.
Is content switching based on IP masking?
Cloaking is a spam technique that typically identifies Googlebot by IP address and shows it content created specifically for Google, and then shows different content to everyone else. Cloaking, therefore, is showing different content specifically to Google and to everyone else.
This is not the case in the scenario described by the Redditor.
Googlebot crawls from US IP addresses, so Google will generally not crawl or index content that has been changed for other countries. It will only see and index US content. Sharing content based on the site visitor’s country of origin also does not qualify as cloaking in the sense of cloaking for spam purposes.
Read the Reddit post:
Q: Banners for certain geographic IP addresses? How does it affect SEO?
Featured image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero
[ad_2]
Source link
