Showing different content according to different geo-locations on same URL

[seoec]

We would like our website to show different content according to different Geo-locations (but in the same language).  For example, if www.mywebsite.com is accessed from the US, it would show text (in English) appealing to North Americans, but, if accessed from Japan, it would show text (also in English) that appeals more to Japanese people. In the Middle East, we would like the website to show different images than those shown in the US and Asia.

Our main concern is that we would like to keep the same URL.

• How will Google index these pages? Will it index the www.mywebsite.com (Japan version) in its Asia archives and the www.mywebsite.com (US version) in its North American archives?
• Will Google penalise us for showing different content across Geo-locations on the same URL?
• What if a URL is meant to show content only in Japan?
• Are there any other issues that we should be looking out for?

Kindest Regards

L.B.

[PaddyDisplays]

Our system does this and I think its a bad Idea (for us any way),  our target market is UK and Ireland.  But when google was crawling our pages they were only getting the US version of the site, so all that nice text we had for the UK and Ireland pages was was missed by google (the US page was the systems default page, with no custom text).  I just copied and pasted our UK & Ireland text to the US default page, then we started to rank for some of the targeted keywords.

Now our problem is that is google bot is getting the prices us dollers instead of Pounds or Euros so for some of our rankings it picking up meta data and showing $ prices in the serps for the UK.

So my advice is be careful, it might seem like a good idea for users, but google will only see the US version of the site

To answer you questions:

• How will Google index these pages? Will it index the www.mywebsite.com (Japan version) in its Asia archives and the www.mywebsite.com (US version) in its North American archives?

It will only index US version for all

• Will Google penalise us for showing different content across Geo-locations on the same URL?

To my knowledge no  (we used they system for 3 years and rank modestly)

• What if a URL is meant to show content only in Japan?

Not sure what you mean, but you need different urls for different content

• Are there any other issues that we should be looking out for?

See what I said above

[seoec]

Thank you so much Paddy Displays for such a prompt and detailed answer.

[Chris.Menke]

seoec,

How your content is cached in different data centers, will have a lot to do with the architecture of your site(s) and where they may be hosted.  CC TLD's may be the way for you to go but it does require an investment in the domains. You can also set up subdomain or us location specific sub folders to separate unique content for each market.  Each option has its own set of pros and cons.

Matt Cutts did a video that goes over the duplicate content issue on country code top level domains here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo and Rand did a white board Friday that covers your architectual options here  http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

[seoec]

Thanks Chris Menke! Checking out the videos now!