AOL/Google filter for IPs

alarming trend for international marketing?

[heini]

It has in some recent discussions here been remarked that Google results get filtered for origin of hosting.

For searches restricted to the country of the searcher Google results are returned, which filter out all listings from IPs, which are based in other countries.

Netscape filters like that and also AOL Germany. Not sure about other AOL outlets. I believe the first beta of AOL.com was also filtered for hosting in US.

To clarify some examples:
Default search at AOL germany is set to "Search in Germany". Returned are results in German, French, English etc, from sites with TLDs like .com, .fr, .co.uk, .at etc.as long as they are hosted in Germany.

If I have a site in German language, with the german ccTLD .de representing a german bricks and mortar biz, which is hosted across the border in say Austria - my site does not show in AOL.de.

If I have a site representing a French biz, in french language with a .fr and targeted to French users, but a German IP - then I'm in.

Another example:
You do a site representing a US and Canada based company, which is hosted in Canada - you won't show up in US-Netscape.

You have a network of sites, targeting different languages and countries and serve them from your own server - all your sites will show up exclusively in the country from where you serve.

The British members face a special situation with Google.co.uk, where this IP filtering apparently is in effect combined with ccTLD filtering.

So up to now it's a feature that Google provides, but which to my knowledge only AOL/TimeWarner via their properties AOL and Netscape have implemented.

Quite obviously this is a miserably failing attempt from AOL/Google at better regional targeting of results.

What worries me however if this might be a trend in the making.
If so it is a serious threat for international marketing, at least for the smaller guy.

[Lisa]

I too have seen this as a problem. It sucks to get shut out of your traget market because you are hosting in another country. I wish robots.txt would be updated to handle this new geo-targeting. Allow the webmaster to override the IP tricks.

User-agent: googlebot
Countries: US UK DE

[erikv]

Hi,

I have noticed that it is hard to convince Google on the browsing side to display Google.com instead of Google.de or .be or whatever. Depending on where the surfer is, Google seems to opt for a local page that you can use as a starting point for searches.

However, from within Belgium I have not noticed a default setting for searching only Belgian sites. The default is to search the web globally. Also, the results I obtain are global.

This is as far as Google is concerned, I haven't tried the others...

Does this help? (I'm new to this stuff, but like to help if I can)

[heini]

Erik, it's not so much from the surfers side - there's always ( until now ) the option for doing worldwide searches at any Google side.
It's more from the marketeers side, where a site is effectively shut out from the default search in the target market - although the site may have the correct language, content taylored for that countries audience, even the correct ccTLD.

Though the way AOL serves results makes for a bad user experience also. When searching for local results the user is not interested in sites in different languages, aimed at different countries - he gets those nevertheless as long as they are served from the country he's living in.

[erikv]

OK, didn't know that.

Perhaps this is a very stupid question, but what is ccTLD ?

Also, I not always reply to posts within a few hours--that's because I'm in Europe and not used to working well into the small hours. I do get up early ;-).

[IanTurner]

This IP filter business is in my opinion the first step along the route of delivering user oriented search results. Okay a misguided step at this time but a step nevertheless.

erikv - ccTLD country code TLD - e.g. .de, .be, .uk etc

[erikv]

Thanks for the clarification on country codes!