Current advice or best practice for personalization by geolocation?
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What is the current advice for displaying content based on a user's geolocation? On the one hand, I know the rule of thumb is that you are not supposed to treat googlebot any different than any other user to your site and shouldn't show different content than what you would show a regular user, however on the other hand, if we personalize the content based on the geography, it means that the content that is indexed would be specific to Mt. View, CA in Google's index, correct? I know I heard years ago that the best practice was to use javascript to personalize the content client side, and block the js with robots.txt so that google indexes a default page and not a geo-specific page. Any insights or advice appreciated.
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I am not that good with Javascript so I can't really comment on that part. I do understand that there can be many legitimate reasons to show people content that is relevant to users based on their location. I think it can be very useful and actually improve the user experience of the people that visit your site. I think it is worth a try and then just monitor the results. Maybe even do some A/B testing with different content to see which is the most productive and provides the best user experience.
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