How do search engine spiders handle Geotargeting by IP (IP D

Hi,

I am planning to seperate my site into countries, by using sub-domains or folders not 100% sure on that at the moment.
For example UK, US, France, Germany etc...

So I am thinking about setting up Geotargeting by IP (IP Delivery) and putting it on the main site www.
So if a user goes to www. and has a UK IP they are sent to uk site. and if they come from a USA IP they are sent to us site,. etc...

But how do search engine spiders hand this, do they have IP ranges from various conutries?

Thanks

NetHosted Staff Joined: 24 Jun 2005 Posts: 1019

I would offer users the choice to select what country they are from when they first land on the page and then save this in a cookie so for return visits they go to the same country page. You can then offer a feature to allow them to switch country later if needed.

IP delivery is hard to do well unless you have access to a huge IP database, even then it might not be suitable for people that travel a lot. Also search engines can potentially take a dislike to it if they associate it with cloaking which they shouldn't but it can happen.

Regards,

Darryl

Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2011 2:14 pm Post subject:

Hi,

My idea was to use Maxmind GeoIP country lite version to start with, then maybe move to the paid version. I know Maxmind has 99.5% on lite and a 99.8% on paid. With the lite version all AOL users are seen as USA.

Maxmind is still using IPV4, but it says as IPV6 become more widely deployed, it will add it to other APIs. They currently have it in: C API and offer a CSV version of IPV6. I will be using the PHP API.

On each of the country sites, I would have links to the other countries website, maybe in the footer, which they could access with a click of the mouse.

The users would be able to use the same login details on, all versions of the sites.

At signup time, I was thinking the standard signup for with all the countries etc... then, maybe call it via the database when they login for the language etc..., but also taking into account there browser/os language setting.

I did think about having www. as a hub with country flags on it and some info about the site, but then I thought that maybe seen as a doorway page, so I thought about Geotargeting by IP.

I just watched a video on Google's webmaster blog, back from 2008 and it, sound like they have various IPs from different countries.
Link: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-google-defines-ip-delivery.html

It did talk a bit about cloaking but, that seems to be if you serve Google etc... different content from the user. But I do understand where you are coming from.

The site would be split up to 16 Countries, USA, UK and parts of Europe, then I would have a international site, for everyone else.

I am also hoping to cut down any fraudulent members, trying to scam other members on the site, with it, I know I can block IP's which I have done, but I would like to take it a bit further, if possible.

Feedback is welcome

Posted: Mon May 02, 2011 2:21 pm Post subject:

Hi,

I have re-thought my plans and am not going to do the Geo-targeting by IP.

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