Serving different content based on IP location
-
I have city centric website. For sake of simplicity, say I only have 2 cities -- City A and City B.
Depending on a user's IP address, they will either get City A or City B. Users can change their location through javascript on pages. But there is no cross-linking between cities. By this, I mean that unless you can read or execute javascript, there is no way for you to get from city A to City B.
My concern is this: googlebot comes to my site, and we serve them up City A. How does City B get discovered if Googlebot doesn't read javascript?
We have an xml sitemap plus plenty of backlinks to City B. Is this sufficient?
Should I provide a static link to City B (and vice versa) on the homepage for crawling purposes?
-
Adding to Daniel's comment, I'd say the big difference "...through our faceted search." It's important to have both the XML entries and a crawl path. An XML sitemap may be enough to get the pages indexed, but they won't inherit any internal link-juice. That comes through your internal links. Somewhere, there needs to be a link that Google can crawl to the other cities.
The direct back-links will help, and should get you indexed and possibly ranking, but you're still losing the authority from the domain as a whole that you'd inherit via internal links. The upshot is that you'll lose ranking power.
-
I do the exact same thing (local business pages based on visitor IP) but you can change your location based on what search terms you enter.
What we also do is allow anyone to browse any state/city results through our faceted search and we have XML sitemap entries for each state/category landing page which will then link down to city level searches.
We have seen no problem with google indexing our site (currently almost 500,000 pages indexed.)
As long as you don't actively hide content that doesn't pertain to the requesting site IP and you provide some way for Google to find it, you should be OK.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Different content on pages with the same URL--except one is at www and the other at www2
Hi! I have two pages with unique content on each. However, they have virtually the same URL--except one is a www and the other is a www2. As far as I know, both pages were meant to gain organic traction. How should this situation be handled for SEO purposes? Thanks for any help! ---Ivey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nichiha0 -
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Client wants to show 2 different types of content based on cookie usage - potential cloaking issue?
Hi, A client of mine has compliance issues in their industry and has to show two different types of content to visitors: domain.com/customer-a/about-us domain.com/customer-b/about-us Next year, they have to increase that to three different types of customer. Rather than creating a third section (customer-c), because it's very similar to one of the types of customers already (customer-b), their web development agency is suggesting changing the content based on cookies, so if a user has indentified themselves as customer-b, they'll be shown /customer-b/, but if they've identified themselves as customer-c, they'll see a different version of /customer-b/ - in other words, the URL won't change, but the content on the page will change, based on their cookie selection. I'm uneasy about this from an SEO POV because: Google will only be able to see one version (/customer-b/ presumably), so it might miss out on indexing valuable /customer-c/ content, It makes sense to separate them into three URL paths so that Google can index them all, It feels like a form of cloaking - i.e. Google only sees one version, when two versions are actually available. I've done some research but everything I'm seeing is saying that it's fine, that it's not a form of cloaking. I can't find any examples specific to this situation though. Any input/advice would be appreciated. Note: The content isn't shown differently based on geography - i.e. these three customers would be within one country (e.g. the UK), which means that hreflang/geo-targeting won't be a workaround unfortunately.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steviephil0 -
Page structure and how to optimize old content
SITE STRUCTURE I am trying to optimize the structure of our site Dreamestatehuahin.com. Getting a visible sitemap of my page make me realized it was not a pyramid as I expected it to be but instead very flat. I Would be happy for some advise on how to structure my site in future aswell how to optimize certain place on the page that i think need a change. 1: structure on posts. Maybe I misunderstand how post works in wordpress or something happen with my theme. When I look at my page sitemap my page is VERY flat because permalinks setting I chose the setting as post name (recommended in most articles). http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/sample-post What I actually believed was that post name was place after /blog/ like: http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/blog/sample-post I would be a good idea to do like this right? Should I add some SEO text on the top of my blog page before the actually posts. Or would this be a bad idea due to pagination causing double content? Could one do 4 blogs in one site and replace the name “blog” in the url with a keywords http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/real-estate-announcement/sample-post http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/hua-hin-attractions/sample-post 2) Pages Based on property type From our top menu, i have made links under for sael using wordpress property types http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/property-type/villa/ http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/property-type/hot-deals/ http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/property-type/condominium/ Earlier I found that these pages created duplictaon of titles due to pagenation so I deleted the h1 What would you do with these pages. Should I optimize them with a text and h1. maybe it is possible to add some title and text content for the top of the first page only (the one page that are linked to our top menu) http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/property-type/villa and not to page 2, 3, 4….. http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/property-type/villa/page/2/ b) Also maybe I should rename the property types WOuld it make sence to change name of the property types from etc villa to villas for sale or even better villas for sale hua hin Then the above urls will look like this instead: http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/property-type/villas-for-sale/ Or Maybe renaming a property type would result in many 404 errors and not be worth the effort? 3) LINKING + REPOSTING OUR “PROPERTY” PAGES AND DO A 301 REDIRECT? a) Would It be good idea to link back from all properties description to one of our 5 optimized landingpages (for the keyword home/house/condo/villa) for sale in Hua Hin? http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/property-hua-hin/ http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/house-for-sale-hua-hin/ b) Also so far we haven’t been really good about optimizing each property (no keywords, optimized titles or descriptions) etc. http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/property/baan-suksamran/ I wonder if it would be worth the effort to optimize content of each of the old properties )photos-text) on our page? Or maybe post the old properties again in a new optimized version and do a 301 redirect from the old post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nm19770 -
Duplicate Content for Deep Pages
Hey guys, For deep, deep pages on a website, does duplicate content matter? The pages I'm talk about are image pages associated with products and will never rank in Google which doesn't concern me. What I'm interested to know though is whether the duplicate content would have an overall effect on the site as a whole? Thanks in advance Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao1 -
Company Blog at a different URL
Ok, I have been doing a lot of work over the past 6 months, disavowing low quality links from spammy directories to our company website, etc. However, my efforts seem to have had a negative, not positive effect. This has brought me back to reconsidering what we are doing as we have lost a good amount of traction on the nationwide Google rankings specifically. Considering our company blog - platinumcctv(dot)net - we have used this blog for a long time to inform customers of new products, software developments and then to provide them links to purchase those components. Last week, I revamped the nearly default wordpress theme to another on a piece of advice. However, someone told me that all of our links should be nofollow, even though it is a company blog because we have many links coming from this domain, and it could be found as spammy. Potato/Potato - But before I start the tedious task of changing every link to no follow on a whim, i searched a lot, but have found no CLEAR substantiation of this. Any ideas? Other recommendations appreciated as well! Platinum-CCTV(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PTCCTV0 -
Need help with duplicate content. Same content; different locations.
We have 2 sites that will have duplicate content (e.g., one company that sells the same products under two different brand names for legal reasons). The two companies are in different geographical areas, but the client will put the same content on each page because they're the same product. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
Fixing Duplicate Content Errors
SEOMOZ Pro is showing some duplicate content errors and wondered the best way to fix them other than re-writing the content. Should I just remove the pages found or should I set up permanent re-directs through to the home page in case there is any link value or visitors on these duplicate pages? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0