I am designing a pretty big website that will target it’s industry on a global level. The site is detecting IP address countries in order to serve content relative to the visitor’s country. Basically alot of content will be restricted to visitors in a given country.
The concern I have is that Google doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to IP based content, as I read here. They seem to think Google might implement better support for crawling IP based content but aren’t sure when and the article is dated Nov 2011.
As a result, I have been considering ways to have Google crawl the site’s IP content by country codes like us.site.com or site.com/us still detecting the visitor’s country by IP and redirecting to the appropriate location. Im not sure if it’s just because I am a little strange at times, but I seem to feel that the subdomain us.site.com seems tidier.
Considering that Google spider ALSO seems to ignore subdomains when there is considerable duplicate content (which may be the case because alot of the content is internationally available), what would you guys recommend?
Should I
- Stop being so darn OCD about us.site.com and use site.com/us?
- Use subdomains because perhaps while the spider ignores duplicate
content on sub-domains, it won’t if there are more unique results?
What about lists of results on my site? Like a category page? - Take a gamble and stick to IP detection only, not using country
codes in the URL and hope for the best that Google will recognise
different content being served on different IP ranges
Thanks in advance
Ok, so i found this which is so far the best explanation I have found, any pointers please feel free to comment