Is Geo-targeting dangerous from a rankings perspective?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

By geo-targeting I mean showing content specific to a given country to all visitors from that country but showing different content, on the same urls, to visitors from other countries.

Google is US based only, as far as I know, so it only sees the US version with googlebot but Google has other sources of data gathering, toolbars, adsense etc so the different content would not go un-noticed.

Would geo-targeting raise a red flag at Google?

[deadsea]

I recall that Google weighed in saying that geo-targeting is A-OK. It is not considered cloaking and should not draw any penalties.

We certainly target our home page based on your location. We show local results that should be relevant to you. We have a more generic home page for people that have an IP address for which the location cannot be determined. We show that same page to googlebot. It hasn't caused any problems so far.

[Leosghost]

Would geo-targeting raise a red flag at Google?

No

[tedster]

However, geo-targeting that uses the exact same URL for all visitors can easily become problematic. It is much better to have a unique URL for a specific geo-target and allow the user to navigate to their own chosen version.

The biggest downside I see to using the same URL is that Google may never index anything but your US content.

The last time I stayed in London the hotel where I stayed used a German ISP. Not only did I have problems seeing US information on sites that did automated geo-targeting, I couldn't see UK information either.

IMO, this kind of content negotiation is something a geeky developer can love, but it makes trouble for the user.

[deadsea]

I agree with tedster. In addition, IP address location databases are just plain wrong in a significant set of cases. You certainly need to let users be able to override their location and a mechanism for crawlers to see all your content with landing pages for users that search for it. I've used it most successfully for setting sane defaults for language and location, but always allowing the user to change it when its auto-determined wrongly.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Definitely, agree that language-specific content should have their own URLs. Something as simple as example.com/en/ example.com/de/ example.com/fr/ with the regular structure sitting below the language folder, intuitive for everyone.