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Hi Edward,

I'm really not a fan of GeoIP detection - not because of cloaking - broadly speaking you're fine on that front.

That said I have seen sites that have clearly tripped some sort of cloaking filter and been penalised as a result; they were using GeoIP to deliver either US or UK content on the same page - rather than pushing to .com or .com/uk. But that's kind of off-topic

The potential issue of redirecting people based on GeoIP is that if you don't make your whole site crawlable for the search bots, they'll typically only be able to access and therefore crawl / index the US content (Google mostly crawls from a US IP).

As you can well imagine - if only your US content is accessible to the bots, then that's the only content that ever stands a chance of ranking.

Just an aside - I also don't like it from a UX perspective; just because I'm in the US right now doesn't necessarily mean I'd like to see US content.

As such I prefer to use GeoIP detection, then let the user decide which content they'd like to view. Cheapflights handle this pretty well - if you visit cheapflights.com from the UK you get pushed to this international choice page - http://www.cheapflights.com/workers/profile-select.aspx?sref=CFUK&redirect=GeoIP&geoip=GB&cfref=CFUS&spt=Home&rp=/ - you can then decide which content you'd like to see. Plus the bots can crawl both versions easily.

Hope this helps

Hannah

Whilst one would hope that Google pay attention to geo-targeting via Webmaster Tools, in my experience it makes no material difference to rankings - either in your desired target or elsewhere.

There's been some debate as to whether or not it only influences 'Pages from the UK' (or whatever your chosen target) - however I've not seen proof it actually influences that either.

In short, if you geo-target via webmaster tools you're not blocking visitors via any other locations.

That said - it is worth noting (as I've alluded to above) geo-targeting via Webmaster tools isn't particularly effective in terms of actually establishing a geographic target for your website. As such if you're serious about establishing a geographic target this might not be the best way.

Hi Thomas,

I think that what you're doing right now is fine -

"...linking from each content page to each other language domain, providing a link to the equivalent content in a separate language on a different CCTLD domain."

Seems sensible from a user perspective - I think the only potential downside is if you're implementing this using lots of anchor text - this could potentially be problematic.

Equally utilising javascript allow users to select language and location seems fine to me.

I hope this helps,

Hannah

I'd concur with this approach - however you can only Geo-Target with Google Webmaster Tools, not language target.

You might be better to implement rel="alternate" hreflang = "x" via your sitemaps to help Google understand which content is intended for which audience. See - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865

I hope this helps,

Hannah

Careful with this

Content in different languages shouldn't be viewed as duplicate, however I have seen sites run into problems when they have say US English and UK English content which is very similar.