Geotargeting/cloaking websites

Hi everyone,
ok I know that geotargeting and cloaking has been mentioned many times.

I would like to know one specific thing though. Imagine, I would be creating a website with a .com TLD, and on there I do have a script finding out where the user would come from. Imagine my home market would be, lets say Germany - so all users from there should be redirected to the german site and everyone else to the english site.

Knowing that all Search engine crawlers are based in the US, would they be redirected to the english one, or does the german google.de have a crawler based in Germany? If not, it would end up indexing my site in english, right?

Is this generally a bad idea to use geotargeting, when I want to do SEO just for the main page and not several separate language pages?

thanks

Hi Mark,

Hope you are doing well. As far as the indexing of the page is concerned you can redirect the user or the visitor according to their IP addresses as Google does when you type google.com it generally redirects you to the local google search engine according to the country you belong. I dont have much technical knowledge but i know it can be made practical.


Hope this helps

Joys to you

Cloaking is only serving Googlebot different content. Redirecting is serving different users, different content. Treat Googlebot like you would any other visitor and you won't get cloaking troubles.



You have to do SEO and maintenance on the seperate language pages, at least if you want the foreign pages to be a success in the search engines in their country.

Personally I don't like IP-redirecting. If Google wouldn't let me search on google.com because of my IP, I would start using Bing and programming in ASP.

I like giving users a choice, instead of forcing a language on them, especially if it is an "inferior non-focus non-seo" part of your site.

"This is the site for the British market, you can browse our catalog in these languages: /fr/ french /de/ german etc."

What is best strategy for your site, I can't tell right now. It depends on your focus, skills, resources and budget. If I was serious about a multi-language site, I'd be sure to (locally) optimize the foreign languages and work without redirects, but with plain ole' url-structures.

Searching on Google De with an optimized german part could produce indented results like:

site.com/
Welcome to our site
--site.com/de/
--herlzichen wilkom auf unseres site

Or with a strong german backlinkprofile:

site.com/de/
herlzichen wilkom auf unseres site
--site.com/
--Welcome to our site

or even:

site.com/de/
herlzichen wilkom auf unseres site
--site.com/de/products/
--schau unseres producten an...

It depends on the niche if multi-language like this gives trust (wow they are active in entire Europe!) or works against trust (I need a personal webdesigner, not someone who is busy with foreign clients all the time)