Say you’ve got a business and you want to offer your services or products to a global audience. Now, its no good just serving standard content to every visitor, regardless of where they come from. You might (read: should) want to tailor your messaging to each specific region, or country, so how do you achieve this?

One option is to serve different content based on the IP address of your visitor, or the HTTP header status of their user-agent/browser. This IP-based content delivery works by using a server-side script that looks up their IP address or interrogates their user-agent’s HTTP header. This then informs the site which content should presented to that user, or rather which page, or if you want to make your life really difficult, which sub-domain.

Problem is that when looking up IPs the results aren’t always accurate, and anonymous proxies give nonsense results. More importantly the major search engines spiders come from the US, so they’ll show US IPs in the lookup- and they’ll therefore be shown the US/english content, so that’s what’ll show up in searches, regardless of your region-tailored content.

If you want make the problem even messier you could try to deliver different language content for each country-visitor- but that requires cloaking which can get you heavily penalized.

The option that will work, and not create more problems than it fixes, is combining a set of proven, quantifiable, techniques:

1. Use one main domain e.g. www.example-site.com only- with this method the creation of country-specific sub-domains is unnecessary.

2. Create an explicitly named country-specific page for each geographic target market e.g. www.example-site/albania.

3. Submit each one of those country-specific pages to Google Webmaster Tools and specify its target location to direct the Google Crawlers from the right geographic location

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