IP Delivery and Geo Targeting by SebastianX

This is a guest post from the elusive SebastianX , you can read more of his rants on his excellent blog Sebastian’s Pamphlets.

So Gareth James asked me to blather about the role of IP delivery in geo targeting. I answered “That’s a complex topic with gazillions of ‘depends’ lacking the potential of getting handled with a panacea”, and thought he’d just bugger off before I’ve to write a book published on his pathetic UK SEO blog. Unfortunately, it didn’t work according to plan A. This @seo_doctor dude is as persistent as a blowfly attacking a huge horse dump. He dared to reply “lol thats why I asked you!”. OMFG! Usually I throw insults at folks starting a sentence with “lol”, and I don’t communicate with native speakers who niggardly shorten “that’s” to “thats” and don’t capitalize any letter except off “I” for egomaniac purposes.

However, I didn’t annoy the Interwebz with a pamphlet for (perceived) ages, and the topic doesn’t exactly lacks controversial discussion, so read on. By the way, Gareth James is a decent guy. I’m just not fair making fun out of his interesting question for the sake of a somewhat funny opening. (That’s why you’ve read this pamphlet on his SEO blog earlier.)

How to increase your bounce rate and get your site tanked on search engine result pages with IP delivery in geo targeting

A sure fire way to make me use my browser’s back button is any sort of redirect based on my current latitude and longitude. If you try it, you can measure my blood pressure in comparision to an altitude some light-years above mother earth’s ground. You’ve seriously fucked up my surfing experience, therefore you’re blacklisted back to the stone age, and even a few stones farther just to make sure your shitty Internet outlet can’t make it to my browser’s rendering engine any more. Also, I’ll report your crappy attempt to make me sick of you to all major search engines for deceptive cloaking. Don’t screw red crabs. Related protip: Treat your visitors with due respect.

Geo targeted ads are annoying enough. When I’m in a Swiss airport’s transit area reading an article on any US news site about the congress’ latest fuck-up in foreign policy, most probably it’s not your best idea to plaster my cell phone’s limited screen real estate with ads recommending Zurich’s hottest brothel that offers a flat rate as low as 500 ‘fränkli’ (SFR) per night. It makes no sense to make me horny minutes before I enter a plane where I can’t smoke for fucking eight+ hours!

Then if you’re the popular search engine that in its almighty wisdom decides that I’ve to seek a reservation Web form of Boston’s best whorehouse for 10am local time (that’s ETA Logan + 2 hours) via google.ch in french language, you’re totally screwed. In other words, because it’s not Google, I go search for it at Bing. (The “goto Google.com” thingy is not exactly reliable, and a totally obsolete detour when I come by with a google.com cookie.)

The same goes for a popular shopping site that redirects me to its Swiss outlet based on my location, although I want to order a book to be delivered to the United States. I’ll place my order elsewhere.

Got it? It’s perfectly fine with me to ask “Do you want to visit our Swiss site? Click here for its version in French, German, Italian or English language”. Just do not force me to view crap I can’t read and didn’t expect to see when I clicked a link!

Regardless whether you redirect me server sided using a questionable ip2location lookup, or client sided evaluating the location I carelessly opened up to your HTML5 based code, you’re doomed coz I’m pissed. I’ve just increased your bounce rate in lightning speed, and trust me that’s not just yours truly alone who tells click tracking search engines that your site is scum.

How to fuck up your geo targeting with IP delivery, SEO-wise

Of course there’s no bullet proof way to obtain a visitor’s actual location based on the HTTP request’s IP address. Also, if the visitor is a search engine crawler, it requests your stuff from Mountain View, Redmond, or an undisclosed location in China, Russia, or some dubious banana republic. I bet that as a US based Internet marketer offering local services accross all states you can’t serve a meaningful ad targeting Berlin, Paris, Moscow or Canton. Not that Ms Googlebot appreciates cloaked content tailored for folks residing at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, by the way.

There’s nothing wrong with delivering a cialis™ or viagra® dealer’s sales pitch to search engine users from a throwaway domain that appeared on a [how to enhance my sexual performance] SERP for undisclosable reasons, but you really shouldn’t do that (or something similar) from your bread and butter site.

When you’ve content in different languages and/or you’re targeting different countries, regions, or whatever, you shall link that content together by language and geographical targets, providing prominent but not obfuscating links to other areas of your site (or local domains) for visitors who –indicated by browser language settings, search terms taken from the query string of the referring page, detected (well, guessed) location, or other available signals– might be interested in these versions. You can and should group those site areas by sitemaps as well as reasonable internal linkage, and use other techniques that distribute link love to each localized version.

Thou shalt not serve more than one version of localized content under one URI! If you can’t resist, you’ll piss off your visitors and you’ll ask for troubles with search engines. This golden rule applies to IP delivery as well as to any other method that redirects users without explicit agreement. Don’t rely on cookies and such to determine the user’s preferred region or language, always provide visible alternatives when you serve localized content based on previously collected user decisions.

But …

Of course there are exceptions to this rule. For example it’s not exactly recommended to provide content featuring freedom of assembly and expression in fascist countries like Iran, Russia or China, and bare boobs as well as Web analytics or Facebook ‘like’ buttons can get you into deep shit in countries like Germany, where last century nazis make the Internat laws. So sometimes, IP delivery is the way to go.

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