Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about whether showing different content based on IP address of the site visitor affected SEO. His answer offered insights into Google’s crawling and indexing.
Showing Banners For Specific Countries
The person asking the question managed a website that wanted to show a banner on the side of the page with country-specific content. Their concern was how that might affect rankings in different countries.
Here’s the question:
“I got one question on how content for different geoip effect for seo?
Some marketers in my company asking me about to place side banner for users of certain geo ip – for example for UK visitors they want to show banner about event that coming in UK), but main geo for website: US.
Does it affect SEO for website overall? How Google classifies that type of placement? Is this kinda sort of cloaking (without purpose to cheat on google systems)?”
John Mueller’s Answer
The person asking the question asked three questions and Mueller limited his response to the one about how it affects SEO.
Mueller answered:
“Google generally crawls from one location – and that’s the content which would be used for search.