Googlebots and cache

[pulcinella2uk]

Our site checks whether visitors are resident in the same country or live abroad.

If it recognises that the visitor comes from abroad, the content is made more appropriate for them. Basically, instead of encouraging the visitor to come and visit a showroom, it tells them that we export worldwide. It does this by IP checking.

So far so good! But I noticed that if I look at cached pages in Google's results, that the cached pages are all export pages. I've also used Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console) and rendered pages as Google - and they also render export pages.

Does anybody have a solution to this?
Is it a problem?
Can Google see the properly (local - as in UK) version of the site?

[DirkC]

Google won't see the local version (I assume your site is UK based) - Googlebot is visiting with an IP from California & will see the "international" version of your site. They indicate that they have bots visiting the site from other IP addresses (local aware crawling) - but to be honest, if I check the server logs of our sites (based in FR & ES) I only find visits from US IP's.

If the international version has only minor differences to the local version it shouldn't be a major problem - if they are major differences it's probably better to find another solution. This could be creating a different version of your site (which could be overkill), or presenting international visitors the choice on first visit (local version/international version). You store the choice in a cookie & personalise the content on the pages based on the cookie value. This way, Google would see the "local" version of the site.

Hope this helps,

Dirk