301 Redirect & Cloaking

[Artience]

HEllo~~~~ People.

I have a question regarding on cloaking.

I will be really greatful if you can help me with question.

I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries.

So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries.

e.g. www.example.com/us/

www.example.com/de/

www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on.

Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries.

Here is my question.

I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com,

my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect.

In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking?

Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.

[RyanKent]

Artience Girl, the information shared by Shane, Aaron and Lewis is correct.

Google wants to see the same page as it would be shown to a user under the same circumstances. If Google is crawling your page from San Jose California, then they want to see what a user from San Jose would see. If they decide to later crawl your site from their center in London, they want to see your site as it would be seen by a London user. The geo-targeting redirects you are presently doing are fine.

If you were to write any code which says to always show the Google crawler the US version of your site, then that tactic would be defined as cloaking. Any time you write code to specifically identify a crawler and show it different content, then you are cloaking.

It seems you are a bit uncomfortable with the answers so let me set you at ease by sharing a Matt Cutts response to your question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw

[Artience]

Hi Shane Thomas.

Thanks for your feedback.

Actually contents is not exactly same, but alot similar. Because I sell different products for different countries.

For example, I sell 30 products for US but only 10 products for UK. In this case, my UK site has only pages for 10 products. Of course, contents lay out and products are similar.

In this case, should I worry about cloaking?

Also, how search engine can see "intent is not deceptive or not"?

I always wondering about that. ^^

[Artience]

Hello, Lewis-SEO. Thanks for your reply, but I am not totally following your answer.

What do you mean by "Google only version of the site"?

You mentioned as follow.

"You will therefore need to decide which regional variation you want Google to end up at when it tries to visit/crawl the www.example.com URL"

Is this meaning that I should set "user agent redirection" for Google bot to send it to particular regional site? e.g. send Google bot to only www.example.com/us/ no matter which country IP address Google bot has?

Please correct me, if I am wrong. But this sounds more cloacking to me.

Google bot with DE IP address should redirect to www.example.com/de/ so google bot can crawl right contents. And when Google bot with UK IP addres should redirect to www.example.com/uk/.

I think if I send alll Google bot to www.example.com/us/ for example, it will confuse google bot more.

Could you please be more specific regarding your answer? PLEASE ~~~

[CPU]

Hi Artience Girl

The Google Webmaster guidelines covers topics like these but a key point is that geotargetting using IP address is fine as long as you are not showing Google a separate Google only version of the site. This would be considered cloaking.

You will therefore need to decide which regional variation you want Google to end up at when it tries to visit/crawl the www.example.com URL

But before you do that check the Google Webmaster guidelines in and around this area as if you follow them you are less likely to end up on the wrong side of them.

Hope this helps.

[Jinx14678]

This really does not fit the description of cloaking, the content is the same, just different languages right?

If this is the case IMO this would not bee seen as cloaking as your are not delivering different content, just user experience.

Also as long as you are not separating IP delivery by source (meaning sending spiders somewhere different than humans) this would not be the definition of cloaking.

WIKI:

One use of IP delivery is to determine the requestor's location, and deliver content specifically written for that country. This isn't necessarily cloaking. For instance, Google uses IP delivery for AdWords and AdSense advertising programs to target users in different geographic locations.

As of 2006, many sites have taken up IP delivery to personalise content for their regular customers. Many of the top 1000 sites, including sites like Amazon (amazon.com), actively use IP delivery. None of these have been banned from search engines **as their intent is not deceptive.  **    Keyword here..... Deceptive 

[AaronSchinke]

I don't think this would come across as cloaking at all. It's a fairly common practice.