A client we work with was embarking on a significant new initiative, which they wanted to be rolled out very selectively. Since they were particular that their audience in a particular country (let’s call it Market X) should be the only ones to see their new initiative, they decided to adopt IP-based content delivery.
However, here was the challenge: they also wanted to attract search engine traffic from Market X for some targeted terms, while not getting any exposure and consequent unwanted traffic from other audiences.
There were a couple of important questions to be addressed before the publisher went live with this approach.
1. Would the IP-based content delivery be considered as cloaking—that much-disliked term amongst SEO professionals?
2. If the answer to (a) above is “no”, how exactly does a search engine view this IP-targeted content when it comes to displaying and ranking the content?
IP-based content delivery is not cloaking, Google finds it acceptable and desirable
The answer to the first question was fairly straight forward. IP-based content delivery is not the same as cloaking (even though there may be similarities), said numerous experts in various forums. A video by Matt Cutts of Google (Google’s unofficial spokesman, I suppose, when it comes to SEO and other Google search-related matters) said the same thing. In fact, listening closely to Cutts in that video would likely give one the impression that IP-based content delivery is not only acceptable, but also desirable. Of course, he does not state so explicitly.
The impact of IP-targeted content on SEO
This issue though wasn’t half as clear and straight forward because there are a few sub-plots here.
* Will Google and the other search engines keep the multiple versions of the same page (ie. pages that have different IP-targeted content) in their index?
* If yes, will the search engine show the IP targeted version for Market X to visitors searching from that market, while showing the version for Market Y to visitors from that country?
* If only one version is retained by the search engine in its index, which version? The answer, which we suspected and validated with a test and looking at some websites, is that
* Only one version of the page seems to be stored in the index. It is the version that can be seen by users in the United States.
We arrived at this conclusion by IP targeting content for 3 different countries on another website including a version for the US. A week after the page with the IP targeted content was put up, we checked the cached version on both Google.com and Yahoo.com. The US versions were cached.
Subsequently, we checked the cached versions of some pages from a couple of very popular websites (Cricinfo.com, for example) that also does some geo-targeting of content. Again, the same result—the US version showed up in the cache.
Things may change in future— in fact, I will be very surprised if it doesn’t very quickly— however, at this point in time, search engines still have a very US-centric outlook (index).
Therefore, from a SEO perspective, if you want your IP-filtered content to be a factor that can contribute to higher search ranking in a particular market, make sure that particular content is visible to users and search engine spiders from the US.
I’m disappointed it has to be this way, but until things change, this seems to be the most prudent and pragmatic approach to both delivering IP-targeted content while also achieving some of your geo-targeted SEO objectives.
- By Manoj Aravindakshan
Manoj Aravindakshan is a Singapore-based online marketing consultant and Director of On Target Media, the publisher of NetMarketer.in.