Google's John Mueller responded to a question on Reddit about whether displaying different content based on a site visitor's IP address affects SEO. His answer provided insight into Google's crawling and indexing.
Displaying banners for specific countries
The person in question managed a website that wanted to display a banner with country-specific content on the side of the page. Their concern was how it would affect the rankings of different countries.
The questions are:
“I have one question about how content in different geoips affects SEO.
Some of the marketers at my company have asked if they would like to place side banners for users in specific geo-IPs. For example, you might want to display a banner about events taking place in the UK to visitors in the UK, but your website's main region is the US.
Does it affect the website's overall SEO? How does Google classify that type of placement? Is this a form of cloaking (without the intent of cheating Google's systems)? ”
John Mueller's answer
The asker asked three questions, but Mueller limited his answer to one about how it would affect SEO.
Mr. Muller replied:
“Google typically crawls from one location and that is the content used for searches.
If you want something to be indexed, you need to make sure it appears there (or globally). The rest is up to you :-)”
Googlebot typically crawls from IP addresses in the United States, but if your IP address is geoblocked, it will switch to an IP in another country.
How Google categorizes side banners
One question that wasn't answered was how Google categorizes “placements.” I believe this “placement” refers to the content that is in the sidebar.
they asked:
“How does Google classify that type of placement?”
Assuming the person is asking how Google categorizes the content in the sidebar, the answer to that question is that Google identifies the main content of a page and often ignores non-main content for ranking purposes. It means that you are ignoring it.
We know that Google distinguishes between different sections of a web page, and an example of this is provided in an interview with Google's Martin Splitt. Mr. Split talked about how Google can identify different parts of a web page, such as the main content, navigation, and other boilerplate text, and give different scores to different parts ( “Differential weighting” is how he described it).
Google then determines where the main content of the page is and summarizes it into what he calls a “centerpiece annotation.” Martin said the featured annotation identifies what the topic is.
In the context of the Reddit question, Google will likely classify side panel banners as not being part of the main content and, as a result, will not use them for ranking purposes.
Can content be modified based on IP address cloaking?
Cloaking is a spamming technique that typically identifies Googlebot by IP address and displays content specifically created for Google, but then displays different content to others. Cloaking therefore results in displaying different content specifically for Google and other users.
The scenario described by the Redditor does not apply.
Because Googlebot crawls from US IP addresses, Google typically does not crawl and index content that has been switched to other countries. Browse and index only US content. Exchanging content based on a site visitor's country of origin is also not cloaking in the sense of cloaking for spam purposes.
Read the Reddit post:
Q: Are there banners for specific geo-IP addresses? How does that affect SEO?
Featured image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero