Different content on the same URL depending on the IP address of the visitor

[Schoellerallibert]

Hi!

Does anybody have any expierence on the SEO impact when changing the content of a page depending on the IP address of the visitor? Would be text content as well as meta information. This happening on the same URL.

Many thanks.

[MrWhippy]

Hi Schoellerallibert,

My first reaction is that this is a way for you to play the system.

Can you share an example of the content that you are going to change?

Also, keep in mind that Google searches from one place and will therefore only see one version of the content.

Steve

[Schoellerallibert]

Thanks for the feedback. This would mainly be about news articles etc.

So as an example domain.com/news would have 10 news articles in English if visited from the UK containing news elements from the UK, but if the same page is visited from the USA, it would have 8 articles with contents of the  USA.

We're wondering if this strokes with any SEO policy and/or has consequences for ranking positions.

[MrWhippy]

Hi,

Thanks for the response.

My suggestions would be to have different pages rather than changing the content based on the location.

First of all, if Google discovered that you are changing content they may hit you with a spam penalty. And I believe it would impact on your rankings as not all the content would be seen.

Secondly, it should be easier to manage, this way. Just make sure you are not duplicating content but with different locations.

[KaneJamison]

The normal way to handle internationalization is to have separate Geo/Language subfolders, and potentially redirect users based upon IP address, or prompt them to switch to the appropriate language or country if they want.

For example, a US-based publisher with separate UK content might do this:

• domain.com/news
• domain.com/uk/news

Is there a reason you want to keep the URL the same while doing multilingual?

Google's overview of methods and why they're good or bad is a good starting point: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en