…a quick follow up from my last SEO post where I noted that the BBC weather pages were having ranking issues.

It also appears that no matter where in the world you search for “weather” from, the news.bbc.co.uk/weather/ SERP title is always “BBC Weather | United States of America”, and when you click through to the page the correct page title for your location is served e.g “BBC Weather | United Kingdom”.

Using a few “from (insert country)” queries, and with the help of contacts around the globe I got the impression that this is so for other location-based weather searches.

If this really is the case then it would appear that the BBC are using what some might call cloaking, but isn’t always the case. With this type of IP Delivery the IP address of a spider is recognised at the server and results are delivered accordingly- Google spiders from the US so it gets the US “BBC Weather | United States of America” page title- the one seen in the SERP.

When you click on that SERP result the server recognises that you are maybe not from the US and delivers the content earmarked for your location- in my case the "BBC Weather | United Kingdom" page title. This isn’t some "evil" cloaking technique as there is no real attempt to mislead or misguide anyone, BUT the US page does serve different content in the form of maps and forecasts- so it is cloaking and may be being filtered as such- possibly why it took so long for them them to bounce back.

A fully functional search-friendly, but clunkier technique for serving country-specific content is where you give your visitors their own choice. This is by no means perfect. There is even evidence that Google struggles to get country content delivery right.