Geo-targeted content and SEO?

[HalogenDigital]

I am wondering, what effect does geo-targeted "cookie cutter" content have on SEO.

For example, one might have a list of "Top US Comedians", which appears as "Top UK Comedians" for users from the United Kingdom.

The data would be populated with information from a database in both cases, but would be completely different for each region, with the exception of a few words. Is this essentially giving Google's (US-based) crawler different content to users?

I know that plenty of sites do it, but is it legitimate? Would it be better to redirect to a unique page, based on location, rather than change the content of one static page? I know what the logical SEO answer is here, but even some of the big players use the "wrong" tactic.

I am very interested to hear your thoughts.

[AlanMosley]

As long as you dont show different content to googlebot or google ip you are ok, sending google to the us page is fine, there is a matt cutts video where he states this.

But i would have 2 pages, and would let users choose what page they want. this way you get more content indexed.