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Text changes language by IP, but the meta tags are fixed

         

serenoo

2:51 pm on Sep 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have a website where meta tags like title, description and kewyord are always the same in English, but the text (anchor text, links, text,..) change by ip: if an ip is from France then all the text is Francaise, if the ip is from Italy the whole text is Italian,...
Could that cause problems with Google?
Is it better to keep everything in English?

tedster

9:10 pm on Sep 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I have seen a lot of chaos caused by IP detection that changes the content - both in Google Search and for users. I recommend allowing the user to make their own choice, and that way you can serve the same content to googlebot that the user sees, which is always the best practice. In that way you can also translate the title and meta description to match the page content, which is a big help.

In my opinion, it is also not a good idea to serve different language versions at the same URL, with the language change based only on server content negotiation. Different content should be on its own dedicated URL, even when that content "means the same thing" and is a translation to a different language.