Does Google give weight to the default measurement units (metric / imperial) on pages?

[nickruss]

Hi,

We run a series of weather websites that cater for the units (feet, metres, Celsius, Fahrenheight etc.) for the users by means of detecting their geo-location. So users in the US see the site in feet, Fahrenheight and pretty much the rest of the world gets metric units.

My concern is that if we view the cached version of our pages as seen by the Googlebot out of Mountain View, California, it shows that our geoIP switch to imperial units has been activated for every location in the World.

The question is, does the fact that we appear to cater for countries who use metric units by showing (in Google's eyes) Imperial units by default count against us from an SEO point of view?

Thanks in advance for any comments,

Nick

[katemorris]

It sounds like you might be using an automatic redirect based on IP. Is that true? If so, that's why Google is only showing the US numbers. They don't prefer one over the other, but you are inherently only showing them the US numbers if you are doing that redirect.

My suggestion is to let people set their location with a javascript based popup that sets a cookie. That will then modify the numbers. If you prefer Google sees the metric numbers, show that to any user that doesn't have a cookie set.

[T0BY]

Great pun in your question!

[ClaytonJ]

Nick

If using symbols I would have think not. My experience is google discounts common symbols. However if it is written yes, I believe it would have an impact. That is something google would take into account.

In fairness I would think people would type in "weather Melbourne tomorrow" or "weather this weekend" - So I would think the most relevant aspect for SEO is dealing with those keywords... and serving up content that answers those queries.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I really can't imagine it would Nick. Have you noticed any reduction in the SERPs that are making you concerned? Google, obviously, have no guidelines on this, so perhaps add in a way to change the units manually, if you wish?

-Andy