Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Different content on the same URL depending on the IP address of the visitor
-
Hi!
Does anybody have any expierence on the SEO impact when changing the content of a page depending on the IP address of the visitor? Would be text content as well as meta information. This happening on the same URL.
Many thanks.
-
The normal way to handle internationalization is to have separate Geo/Language subfolders, and potentially redirect users based upon IP address, or prompt them to switch to the appropriate language or country if they want.
For example, a US-based publisher with separate UK content might do this:
Is there a reason you want to keep the URL the same while doing multilingual?
Google's overview of methods and why they're good or bad is a good starting point: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
-
Hi,
Thanks for the response.
My suggestions would be to have different pages rather than changing the content based on the location.
First of all, if Google discovered that you are changing content they may hit you with a spam penalty. And I believe it would impact on your rankings as not all the content would be seen.
Secondly, it should be easier to manage, this way. Just make sure you are not duplicating content but with different locations.
-
Thanks for the feedback. This would mainly be about news articles etc.
So as an example domain.com/news would have 10 news articles in English if visited from the UK containing news elements from the UK, but if the same page is visited from the USA, it would have 8 articles with contents of the USA.
We're wondering if this strokes with any SEO policy and/or has consequences for ranking positions.
-
Hi Schoellerallibert,
My first reaction is that this is a way for you to play the system.
Can you share an example of the content that you are going to change?
Also, keep in mind that Google searches from one place and will therefore only see one version of the content.
Steve
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
-
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
SEO impact difference between a URL Rewrite and 301 redirect
Hi guys and girls! Just putting a new site live, we changed the URL from one thing to another and I created a 301 file redirecting the urls like for like. The developer installing it has created a different file with columns like: RewriteRule ^page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^/page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] What's the difference? The page redirects but is there a difference between the 301 redirect and this URL rewrite in terms of SEO and link value?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
The benefits from having a dedicated IP
Is the true? Claim by SiteGround Having a dedicated IP for each website is considered by some experts as an advantage for search engine optimization. There is a common believe that sites with dedicated IP addresses do better in the search engine results than those on shared IPs. Such sites do not share the risk of being banned for sharing the same IP in case another website hosted on the same server gets banned by a search engine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
Changing Server IP Addresses. Should I be concerned?
Hello Mozers Our site has been on a dedicated server for about four years now. (no other sites, just ours on the server) I have made the decision to move it to a much better and faster server than the current server we are on for more than one reason. My big fear is Google will lose trust for my site because of the IP change. Ip's stay with the server at 1and1 they do not follow the website. So, I have done my due diligence and copied over all code and databases and have tested it completely to insure there are no issues when I change the DNS to point to the new server. Made sure 1and1 is giving me an IP that has never been used, I am Keeping the old server on until cached DNS records expire for it. Is there anything else I need to do to make sure I do not lose current rankings in Google? I have heard nightmare stories about making these kinds of changes but at this point for our site there is no turning back this is a change that must take place. Any pointers and advice would be much appreciated! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robbie82991 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChatterBlock0 -
Removing dashes in our URLs?
Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0 -
Capitals in url creates duplicate content?
Hey Guys, I had a quick look around however I couldn't find a specific answer to this. Currently, the SEOmoz tools come back and show a heap of duplicate content on my site. And there's a fair bit of it. However, a heap of those errors are relating to random capitals in the urls. for example. "www.website.com.au/Home/information/Stuff" is being treated as duplicate content of "www.website.com.au/home/information/stuff" (Note the difference in capitals). Anyone have any recommendations as to how to fix this server side(keeping in mind it's not practical or possible to fix all of these links) or to tell Google to ignore the capitalisation? Any help is greatly appreciated. LM.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlS0 -
Is it safe to redirect multiple URLs to a single URL?
Hi, I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates. The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date. The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links. Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain. My intention is to: Shut down the old site Focus all attention on building up content on the new website Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...) Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage Sounds good, right? But there is one issue I need some advice on... The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site. I call these my "black sheep pages". So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death? OPTION A: oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndreVanKets
oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION B: oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION 😄 oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com -> newsite.com My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique. What would you do? Help 😐1
