Delivering different content according to country

[Kung_fu_Panda]

Hey,

I have a question regarding different content according to country (IP)-
We planing to serve mobile users using dynamic HTML serving (on the same url)
Is it possible to serve different content for different devices + different IPs (for example different content for a user from US android and someone from UK android )

thanks!

[Hannah_Smith]

Hello there,

First up let's deal with the international element. As John has mentioned Googlebot typically crawls from the US - as such if you're dynamically serving content based on IP (on the same URL) you're in danger of Google only being able to crawl and index your US content as it's unlikely Googlebot will ever see the content you've created for other countries.

As such I'd recommend creating distinct URLs for each country and using rel=alternate hreflang as John Barth has suggested. Just to be clear - I wouldn't recommend serving UK vs US content dynamically on the same URL.

However, from these distinct URLs it's totally fine to serve content appropriate to the device. Use the Vary-HTTP Header to indicate to Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile that a mobile user-agent gets served a different version (in order to avoid looking like you’re cloaking). See https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details.

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[john4math]

Yes, you could do this.  Googlebot almost always comes from the US (I've seen it come from Canada before), so Google will probably only see your US content, and use that in SERPs around the world.  An ideal set up for this would be doing geo-based redirects to distinct URLs depending on the locations. To keep from having duplicate content, you can set up rel=alternate hreflang.  With this set up, Google can find all your different international versions, and serve the right pages in international SERPs.  With this set up people in the UK who search will see your UK pages.

You can also sniff out Googlebot-Mobile and serve your mobile pages to it, so that Google uses your mobile pages in their mobile SERPs.