What is the best way to make country specific IP redirect for only product pricng pages?

[RyanSat]

My website has 3 services and its price will be different for US/EU/Developed world and Asian/African countries.Apart from pricing page, all other things remain same.

I want to use IP based redirect .I heard this thing is called cloaking and used by black-hat guys.

What kind of instructions should I give to my web developer to look best to Google/Search bots and correctly show visitors the intended prices.Is there any caution to be taken care of.

Thanks for your time

[RyanKent]

Cloaking is defined as presenting different content to search engines then you do to other visitors. Cloaking is an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings and is indeed a black hat practice.

Geographic redirects is a perfectly legitimate practice whereby you wish to show users from specific countries content which has been localized. The localization includes not only currencies but language, units of measurement and cultural references.

Some suggestions for your localized pages:

• separate content based on country, not language. For example the USA and UK both speak English, but they each use different dialects, currencies and measurements. Depending on what products or services you are offering, you may need to update more then just the pricing.

• keep the pages on the same domain but use folders to separate country-specific content

• use the language meta tag on each localized page to indicate it's target

• offer a method for visitors to change their country manually. I recommend small images of each country's flag. They are very recognizable and understandable.

[EGOL]

You might also serve the exact same page to everyone but read the environment variables of the inbound visitor to determine which prices to show.

Or... serve same page to everyone and simply have  a dropdown menu or radio buttons for the visitor to select proper pricing.

One problem that you will have is... some people from country A will be buying the service for a location in country B.   Lots of transactions on US websites are made by people who are working in or visiting other countries.  You might be surprised at how often this happens.

[RyanSat]

Thanks for the answer.

I do not want average users to know what price is offered at other country .Though, somebody going via proxy can know .But,that is not an issue! So,country selection is not an option for me!

I have seen some websites making errors on detecting my country.How to minimize such errors?Is it that difficult for assigning country from IP technically?

[RyanKent]

In my opinion, you absolutely must offer visitors the ability to manually select their country. I do everything possible to avoid legal contracts, but if a client requested country-based content and refused to allow users to manually change their country I would either refuse to accommodate the request, or would have a legal disclaimer written up. The disclaimer would read something similar to:

"I have requested a change be made to my site which is against the advice of my consultant and the best practices of the SEO industry. I have been advised this change will lead to a negative user experience which will impact my sales and other statistical measurements of my site. "

The issue is however the geo-location is created, there is a 100% guarantee to be errors. There are people and companies who live near borders and otherwise choose ISPs or IPs from other countries. There are also people living, working and visiting other countries. You are forcing these people to view information in a format they do not desire and may not understand.

10-15 years ago, many people felt stuck with the options available on the internet. Those days are long gone. If your website is not presented in a very easy to do business with manner, you will turn buyers into visitors who bounce off your site and go to competitors.

[RyanSat]

Points noted.

I am targeting users continent wise.

1)North America

2)Europe,Australia

3)Rest

Hopefully,that will reduce the border overlap problem.(?) I do not mind 1 and 2 be mixed just 3 has to be separate due to my business model and vast Purchasing power parity difference.

Will the error be less than 10-15% seeing the above conditions? Any best practices to minimize?

I appreciate your time,Ryan.