Detecting country of origin

how to detect what country browsers are in

[philicious]

We have two clients who want some kind of way to deliver customised content to people from different countries.

One wants different different currencies to be shown based on where the user is, and the other wants to deliver different spellings to US-english and GB-(and NZ, AU etc) audiences.

We are considering detecting IP ranges and also the language settings of the browser. Any suggestions as to the best method?

One important issue is search engines - what effect will this have on search engine robots? Ideally, we would like both language versions to be indexed so that people searching for "? customization" and "? customisation" will find the site. Is there any way to do this without creating two versions of every content page?

Thanks!

[dingman]

I wouldn't even bother with IP addresses, or if I did I'd make them secondary to language settings. Browsers distributed in a particular area are likely to have reasonable default language settings. (Clearly, the fact that mine came with en-us set and it was right backs this up right? ;)) And if I take my laptop with me on a trip back to Martinique, and decide to do some shopping there using my host mother's dial-up account, you're going to get more accurate info about how I understand prices from the fact that my browser says 'en-us, fr;q=0.66, de;q=0.33' than from the fact that I'm on a France Telecom IP. Of course, without the '-us' you don't know if I like GB pounds or US dollars or CA dollars or maybe even EC dollars.

Maybe we need an 'Accept Currency' HTTP header next time the w3c revises http?

[philicious]

Thanks Dingman. I am inclined to go with the language settings, but I'm not sure how accurate this is.

And since I posted this, it has become an issue for another client - all of their major keywords target the British spelling, but there are more people searching (just) for the US spelling. How do you get around this?

[brotherhood of LAN]

For the IP address thing, here's [webmasterworld.com] an older thread if that helps

[jaski]

How about simply making separate pages and give links to them from default page, like its done for francais and espanol etc.

The advantages of this would be that 1) spiders will be able to crawl all the different versions..and 2) you will also avoid the risk of being given a cloacking penalization.

Experts please correct me if I am wrong somewhere.