Geo Targeting Traffic and Redirection..

[Gateway]

We have been looking at geo targeting our traffic and redirecting them to other locations on our web sites or other sites in our network that are more valid for the type of traffic.

Does Google penalize a site that does this?

for example our new site we are working on will be in a few various languages, and instead of having to go to the main page all the time, click the country we are detecting where the user is coming from on the fly and sending them to a url that suites their language or payment options.

Thoughts?

[jmccormac]

The obvious question would be: how would Google know? Since Google's IP range is in the US, the spiders would get sent to the US/English language site. Some kind of realtime sorting of bots and referrers would be necessary for it to run smoothly. You would also have to have a continually updated set of IP data and it would have to be deep rather than the simple one that many Geolocation services seem to use as their free option. Allowing the user to choose may be a better way as often you can run into problems with people on holidays or on business outside their home country using the site.

Regards...jmcc

[fliks]

Why should Google penalize a practic they do themself excessively?

Google.com redirects to the local google Domains based on the users IP and I'm pretty sure to remember that google used the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE variable to show the fitting language profile to their users.

Google cloaks based on the User-Agent - the "Make Google Your Homepage!" Link does only appear to MSIE visitors who haven't set google as their Homepage - to all other surfers this link doesn't appear in the sourcecode at all.

Why the **** shall we stop doing targeting traffic based on IP or useragent?

[Gateway]

I would agree to all of that, I think what google or SE's dont like is that well software like this can be used to cloak sites and send the SE bots to an alternative page etc.

anyhow there are alot of legit reasons why people want to geo target surfers, as ad campaigns become more competivie its more and more important to detect where a surfer is coming from.

ie you dont want to show a surfer a page with a ad thats not even relevant to them.. you see this all the time in news papers their ad inserts are target specific based upon the location.

anyhow dont need to really explain the need for this im just wondering how google handles this.. :/

some software like this.. [georedirect.com?...]