Personalised Geo-targeted results - How does Google pass link juice?

[xoffie]

Hello,

Many websites now serve specific home page offers based on the location of the customer, my question is, how does link juice flow around a site when the links (this case from the homepage) are served up based on a visitors location? Internal links from your homepage are valuable for ranking that product well in the SERPs so how does Google deal with this?

So, for example, a car hire website based in the UK. If you arrive on the care hire website sat in Manchester (Northern UK city), on the homepage the website serves offers of car hire deals in Manchester, Leeds, London and international destinations. If you arrived on this website from London (Southern UK City), you would not see the Manchester link at all but London, and other cities in the South.

In this case, when Google crawls the car hire website, it will see internal links but a)which version and b) is there any way of sharing this link value around?

Basically, we want to understand if Manchester in this case will get the benefit of an internal homepage link from Google even though we only show Manchester to people FROM Manchester, OR, do Google only give juice based on one version of the website, a generic UK version?

Or to put it another way, is there any way of cashing in on both geo-targetting the customer based on their location AND getting link juice from those geo-specific home page links? Perhaps there is some code or way of telling Google that people from Manchester (a certain % of our visitors) will see a homepage internal link for Manchester that will pass some small % link value?

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Xoffie,

Google passes around link juice based on the version of the site that Googlebot is served when it crawls your site. Googlebot has a few IP addresses (which will indicate it's location for your server to choose a version of your homepage), but most of them are in the US, so it's likely that Google will see the US version of your site.

So the question is, is the US version of your site what you want Google to see?