IP Delivery - Search Engine friendly?

[Quarfelburg]

Hi all! First post on the forum, I am truly impressed by the vast amount of information here.
First a little intro for my problem...

I am making a script that loads a different site based on what country the visitor is from. The script uses the GeoIP db (a geographical list of ip's - open source is at www.maxmind.com).

It would load one of two sites; a .com(default) if the user is non-Canadian, and a .ca if the user is Canadian. The reason for this is a difference in price structure.

Ok my question is two-fold. Firstly, is this considered cloaking by Google? I have read so many different responses to this that I am left more confused then when I started out ;-) As far as I know (which isn't very far) Google is using this same system, and their definition of cloaking only deals with using spider ip's, and using ip delivery is OK if it is beneficial to the user. This is obviously beneficial to the user as it would show (most of the time) the correct price for products.

Now for my subject line question. What is the best (safest) way of doing the delivery? I do not want to hurt my standings at all.

Thanks a lot, and happy posting!

(P.S. I posted this in the Cloaking section as well, I feel that it is relevant in both sections. Apologies if that is wrong.)

[Dreamquick]

If I'm reading this right you are considering sending customers to either yoursite.com or yoursite.ca based on the country you think their IP address is coming from where the difference between the sites is the currency of the pricing.

That sounds pretty safe at the moment, but what method are you going to use to send customers between the site once you know they are at the wrong one?

- Tony

[Quarfelburg]

Thanks for the response Dreamquick; only a Canadian user can goto the wrong site (.com would be default) and I don't worry so much about that.

My issues are the following:

1)Is what I'm doing considered cloaking by Google? Is there any risk? Would writing an email to Google help, or just be completely ignored?

2)The thing I really need to know is a safe method of IP delivery. Is Perl delivery search engine friendly, or is there a certain technique that is common practice by SEO's?

[Dreamquick]

I wouldn't call that cloaking since you have two different domains and essentially all you would be doing would be to transfer a canadian user to a version of the site which best suited them, presumably via a http-redirect.

The "cloaking" version of that would be to substitute the prices dynamically, but even then that's really such a trivial change it's unlikely to trip any automated penalties (if they even exist) and to a human reviewer this would be an understandable set of changes.

As for what's common practice among SEO's don't ask me I'm just a coder :)

If it was me I'd look at what the server supported as what you want sounds like its possible via .htaccess rather than delving into the world of server-side code (Perl, ASP, PHP etc)...