Geo targeting a problem with Google?

[SEOPTI]

I would like to send all my UK and German visitors to another page (with a 302 redirect) than the main page. The US visitors will still get the main page.

I believe it's not a problem because Googlebot spiders with US IPs so it can't recognize if I redirect foreign traffic or not.

What's your opinion?

[amazed]

depends on how you get your visitors.
my impression is that google is going into geotargeting in a big way, so trying to get everybody with one page ranking well in the US mainly might not be a good idea.

[SEOPTI]

It's a good idea because you can redirect surfers to their country language website when you have your website in different languages.

[heini]

>you can redirect surfers to their country language website when you have your website in different languages.

True. Multilingual sites are a very good way of catching international traffic.
The problem with Google however is to get good rankings for the multilingual content.
If you won't let Google know about alternative languages, you won't rank....

[Sinner_G]

If you won't let Google know about alternative languages, you won't rank....

Now that's pretty easy to do, in addition to the redirect, just have links to the different contry pages on the main page. May also come handy for UK travellers in the US.

[jetboy_70]

Surely when Google decides what laguage a site is in it does it for the site as a whole, not on a page-by-page basis? If so, having different languages under the same domain isn't going to get you into regional SERPs.

[heini]

Google does decide on a per page basis.
Lets look at it from the POV of a user:
- user searches unrestricted - gets results from all languages, from all sites
- user restricts to a language - gets results from pages in that language
- user restricts to results from a country - gets results from all languages, but only from sites running under appropriate ccTLD or IP from that country.

So if you have links to the alternative langs Google will index them and display upon queries fro appropriate keywords, in that languages.

Redirects are done by a lot of huge multilingual sites. Basically it's cloaking. Prominent examples are large well known search engines, like Google, Altavista et al.

[jetboy_70]

Now you see, that's good to know - thanks Heini. Would you agree that if you want full coverage from one physical site that you are going to need all the appropriate TLDs, and are going to have to be very careful of getting duplicate content listed under more than one of them?