Using IP to deliver different sidebar content on homepage

[seoninjaz]

We have a site with a generic top level domain and we'd like to use a small portion of the homepage to cater content based on the IP of a visiting user.

The content is for product dealerships around different regions/states of the US, not internationally. The idea being that someone from Seattle would see dealerships for this product near their location in Seattle.

The section on the homepage is relatively small and would churn out 5 links and images according to location. The rest of the homepage would be the same for everyone, which includes links to news and reviews and fuller content.

We have landing pages for regional/state content deeper in the site that don't use an IP to deliver content and also have unique URLs for the different regions/states. An example being a "Washington State Dealerships" landing page with links to all the dealerships there.

We're wondering what kind of SEO impact there would be to having a section of the homepage delivering different content based on IP, and if there's anything we should do about it (or if we should be doing it all!).

Thank you.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

I think its a great idea and should help with conversions. I don't see any negative SEO consequences of doing that.

[seoninjaz]

Thanks for the response, Oleg.

I guess a concern is if a googlebot with a Florida IP crawls the homepage, it will see florida dealerships. Will the homepage in Google's index then reflect a more Florida geared page and not be so readily served up to someone in Seattle because of some Florida keywords?

I feel like Google is smarter than this and has strategy in place for dealing with this type of content. We're just looking for some kind of reassurance.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Hmm, good point. I would like to think that they would have something in place to recognize that. e.g. when a crawler from CA crawls and the keywords change to CA, G would recognize that the listings are generated based on geoip (which should be a considered a good thing for relevance). In addition, you said it was a small portion of the page's content so it probably wouldn't affect rankings much.

In G's own words, focus on the user instead of the search engine. In this scenario, your users and you have a lot more to gain from having much more targeted listings show up on your site.

Cheers,
Oleg