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This is my first time here at the boards. I've been browsing here for the last week and I decided I need to jump in the mix and talk. Alot of very good discussions and questions have came up that I was wondering myself.
Now, my question is can cloaking be used to offer geographic targeted pages inside the US. I know this can be done for other countries but i'm speaking about regions in the USA. Besides the problems of trying to figure out if IPs are maped out (ie east and west) would this be ok in the eyes of the SEs?
I see nothing wrong with what you are doing, the problem is actually mapping the ip's. There are programs out there that are geographical lists of ip's (http://www.maxmind.com is open source), but you cannot get 100% accuracy with this method as it tracks the ip of the server and not the user (let alone proxy servers). If you are not trying to hide the sites from eachother I would suggest getting a generic splash page allowing the user to choose from a list of states.
I have posted a question much to the same effect, I know enough about mapping the ip's - the question for me is the delivery. To anyone out there - what is the most search engine friendly way of redirecting (.htacces, serverside, http redirect, etc)?
I know it would be a problem but I wasn't expecting to be able to do it for everyone. More like for easy to identify IPs like for example *.socal.rr.com
I would figure the SE would applaud someone if they were able to put out demographically targeted pages for the users. It makes the site look good and it makes the SE look good because they returned a very relevant result to the query.
I just might do what was suggest offer a regional map for them to click on.
