Personalization software and SEO

[anagentile]

Hi guys,

I'm just testing a personalization software in our website, basically changing the "location" text depending on the user's IP.

I can see in my software that when the Google bot comes to our site the personalization software  triggers an action changing the location based text to "California". Can this make Google understand that our website targets only users in California and thereof  hurt our rankings in other locations nationwide?

I'll appreciate your opinions.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Don't worry about this, it shouldn't be an issue. One thing you can do is target your website in Webmaster Tools if you're looking to target specific regions.

Amazon and Groupon have personalization happening on their sites as well - but that doesn't effect their ratings.

I would also take a look at:
SEO in the Personalization Age

Let me know if this helps at all!

[DirkC]

Hi,

I don't really agree with the answer of Patrick. Depending on the level of personalisation you apply, it can hurt your rankings for locations outside California (our eventual other ip locations for Google bot).

As an example - you manage a chain of Chinese restaurants spread around the country and you have the domain mychineserestaurant.com.

If users accesses the site directly in New York, he will see the address, picture, phone number etc. from the New York restaurant. Googlebot however will never see this content - the bot will only be able to access the content from your branch in Los Angeles. While this is great for the user experience, there is no way to show Google the other locations, as you are obliged to show the bot the same content as normal human users, and hence show the information based on the ip of the bot.

The example of Groupon given by Patrick is not exactly the same - they personalise the homepage based on your ip - but if you search for Groupon New York you go to http://www.groupon.com/local/new-york-city

What you could do is automatically redirect the user to the appropriate page based on ip - but still have the other pages accessible via normal links. In the example above - accessing the site in New York I would go by default to mychineserestaurant.com/newyork but with the option to change the location. This way Google bot would be able to crawl all the locations. It's also the advice coming from Matt Cutts: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/give-each-store-a-url/

If the personalisation is only minor (example only the local address on the homepage) and if you already have targeted pages for each location it should not really be a problem.

To be honest - it's rather my own opinion than something which is supported by hard facts.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Dirk

Thanks for the corrections and examples here. I appreciate it and learned something new here myself.

Out of curiosity, what do you make of the following: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en

After reading your explanation, and Google's suggestion in bold and red here, I understand the importance of your recommendation. I was just wondering your thoughts on this particular article and what you make of it.

Thanks so much again and well done!

[anagentile]

Hi both,

Thanks a lot for your ideas and suggestions. No doubt it's a tough subject. I don't really understand Google's position about this, on one hand they want you to provide a better user experience (what can be done through personalization) and on the other hand they don't seem to be providing reasonable solutions to potential SEO drawbacks.

Dirk, referencing this line of yours "What you could do is automatically redirect the user to the appropriate page based on ip - but still have the other pages accessible via normal links", don't you think if the user is directly redirected to the "location based-page" then the Google bot coming from California (as an example) will also be redirected to it and then understand that the website is targeting California?

I read something at Unbounce regarding dynamic text replacement that caught my attention http://documentation.unbounce.com/hc/en-us/articles/203661004-Dynamic-Text-Replacement-pro-

They say “It's always been possible with Unbounce to do text replacement using a little bit of JavaScript, but unfortunately the bots and crawlers that Google (and other ad networks) use to validate your landing page quality don't read Javascript.”

If the fact that the bots cannot read Javascript is true maybe using Javascript for small personalization actions such as changing the location-based text maybe the solution. I wonder if this follows google guidelines or not.

Again I'll appreciate your answers; I'll go through all the links and information and keep investigating. I really need to find some technically supported facts.

Thank again. Ana

[DirkC]

Hi Patrick,

If the question would have been about country targeting I guess your answer would have been correct. As mentioned in the article however, the lowest level of geolocation is country. As the question was about locations "nationwide" I would conclude based on this article that at this point of time Google is unable to detect geo-targeted content based on region or city.

Even for countries I think it's a risky business - as the article doesn't indicate if this "local" bots visit the sites with the same frequency & depth as the normal ones, and they don't clearly indicate which country ip's are used.

It's a different story for languages - because you can indicate in the HTTP header that the content is depending on the user's language. A similar case is the dynamic serving for mobile (https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/dynamic-serving?hl=en) - here you can indicate that the content is changing based on the user agent.

As far as I know, there is no way to indicate in the HTTP header that the content is varying based on ip address.

rgds,

Dirk

[PatrickDelehanty]

This is great Dirk - thanks so much for your insight as always!

[DirkC]

Hi Ana,

Just to clarify - if you redirect based on ip to a location based url like /newyork you can still have a link on the page going to the other locations like /sandiego - so Google can access all these pages & index them. This is not possible it the scenario you mentioned.

Not sure how old the article from unbounce is, but Google bot is able to interpret javascript (to a certain extent). Using javascript won't change the problem - as long as you have only one page that adapts automatically to the ip location you will be unable show all versions of the page to Google - it will help your Californian branch, but hurt all the others.

rgds,

Dirk

[anagentile]

Thanks for your insights Dirk.

[anagentile]

So Mr King, would it be reasonable to say that personalizing all locations but California would keep us out of trouble?

Thanks Mike!