Content by Country

[promonet]

Currently we have a news website aimed at several countries. We want to filter the content of some url (home, category pages, ...) using the country of origin of the visitor.

For example in the home we've heard of global character, and a column with news of the country of origin of the visitor.

This may affect the position or cause a Google penalty?

thank you very much

[SanketPatel]

Can i have your site URL ?? I am not sure but  if you have filtered your content using country origin then it will not affect your ranking and does not cause Google penalty.

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Jose,

Are you talking about doing an IP redirect to country-specific URLs? Or changing the content displayed based on the user's IP?

If so, I don't really like either of those options - automatically redirecting a user based on IP can cause issues in terms of indexation as Google crawl via a US IP, and if you're not careful US content is all they'll be able to see.

Similarly if you're talking about dynamically delivering page content based on IP - again you're likely to have indexation problems as Google may only be able to crawl and index US content; plus (more importantly) I've seen sites penalised in the past for doing this sort of thing.

If you want to direct visitors to the most appropriate content I quite like the approach that Cheap Flights use - if you visit cheapflights.com from a UK IP you're pushed to this page - http://www.cheapflights.com/workers/profile-select.aspx?sref=CFUK&redirect=GeoIP&geoip=GB&cfref=CFUS&spt=Home&rp=/

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[promonet]

Thanks for the replies.

I show you what we do on the Web in beta

gestion.org / beta

All content is the same for all countries, except the middle column shows posts where the user's country. So far only four countries (Spain, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia). If a user is not in any of these countries, shows general posts.

This can be done?

[Hannah_Smith]

According to Matt Cutts this sort of thing is ok - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw - provided you're not treating Googlebot differently - which would be cloaking.

However, as I said above I have seen sites that have implemented this sort of thing penalised - likely because they've inadvertently tripped some sort of cloaking filter (even though strictly speaking what they're doing isn't cloaking).

Hope this helps,

Hannah