How to test a geo tagged homepage?
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The e-commerance system we have has a geo tagged hompage system so you can set up different homepages based on the user country IP. But I want to test what the default homepage is, if the system can not get the user IP, does anyone know of a way to do this?
Also does googles bot, not give an IP for this, or is it always an American IP (even if your site is set to a different country)?
Thanks
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Unfortunately it seems that the e-commerce (which is closed sourced) is built around this geo IP location system.
When I checked the cached version of the site it was indeed the American version, which was just the default simple version of the homepage (no keyword text)
I then google searched stings of texts from our UK / Irish homepages, and no results found
So I then created an American version of the homepage (just a dup of the uk/irish homepages)
A week later did my search test, and got a hit.
Now we are starting to rank for a few more keywords on the homepage
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I do not recommend redirecting people to different content based on IP. Googlebot may change IP addresses but it's always from the US. This makes it impossible for Googlebot to see any of your international content. You can use the IP address to ask the user if they want to set their settings to a different country and be placed there every time, but do not assume.
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There are many proxy services out there so you can do Geo Testing. Basically they have a server in that country and using their settings you funnel your requests through that server and it's just like you were in that country. I know there's Wonder Proxy and I'm sure you could find others.
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I'm not sure about the 'testing tool' thing, but Google says that Googlebot's IP Address changes from 'time to time' but that same explanation says you can look in your website's logs and do a reverse DNS lookup.
In terms of a 'default' page... in my opinion you should ensure you have a standard (unmodified/non-redirected) home page. So if your primary market is the USA then that's the default and then only redirect non-US based folk. That way you determine the default home page and aren't reliant on Googlebot's IP (or any other crawler's for that matter).
Hope this helps.
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