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There are many in the industry who use IP recognition to serve ads or fool search engine spiders through cloaking.  Yet I’m here to tell you that there are many other uses for IP recognition as well, such as improving your search engine positioning, and serving geo-targetted content.

Before I get into what you can do with IP recognition, let me explain what it is.

IP recognition is a way to recognize where visitors are from by matching their IP address to a database of world IP addresses.

Each country in the world is assigned an IP range from which ISPs pull IP addresses to assign to their clients.  Even companies who want a private IP request them from the same pool as ISPs.

In addition, each Domain Name Server also knows where these IP addresses reside, so even if a site is a “.com” or a “.co.uk” domain, the DNS system still knows that not all .com domains reside in the US, nor do all .co.uk domains reside in the UK.  In fact, we all know that domains can reside all over the world regardless of their DNS suffix.

So it is important to have another way to identify you visitor and this is where the IP comes in.

IP addresses are about as unique as they can get.  Sure multiple users can share IP’s as is common with large ISP’s but the address still comes from one country’s pool.

So how does one set up IP recognition?

Well, first, you need to get the free IP to country database.  This can be found at this IP to Country website.  On this site you will also find examples in PHP and ASP scripts which can be used to implement the resolution of an IP address to a country.  There is a little work involved – it isn’t just a matter of finding the IP in the database and matching it to a country.  There are some calculations, but complete instructions can be found on the site.

How can one use IP recognition?

Here’s where we can have fun.  But this is also essential for those companies who wish to take their website’s global.

This is because there are more than just US versions of English.  There’s also British English, Canadian English, and Australian English, to name just a few.

But why would you be concerned about different versions of English? They all read the same don’t they?

This is true.  Too true in fact.  You see, if you have different websites used for different regions, chances are you are going to want to use the same pages for all those regions.

Let’s say for example that you are a travel company.  You want to offer vacations to travelers all over the world, but you want to be able to show them prices in their own locality.  We already know that each country has it’s own currency, and that people prefer to shop that way. They don’t want to have to convert US dollars to Euros or Canadian dollars.  Therefore, your site has to be able to do that.

But do you want your visitor to specify their country each time they visit the site, or wouldn’t it be easier to know where they are coming from and serve them regionalized pricing?

This is where IP recognition can help.  By recognizing their IP address and associating it to a country, you can now serve them localized content and prices.

Seems simple huh?

Except for one thing:  The major search engine crawlers all reside in the US.  Therefore the content you provide them should be US specific.  And if they do happen to find non-US pages with the same English content you could be looking at a duplicate content penalty. 

In other words, the crawler will want to index all the content on your site, but you don’t want them to index all the US content, as well as the Canadian content, the UK content and the Australian content.  Particularly if it is all the same.

So how does one handle non-US content?

Simple really – use the same IP recognition to serve US only content to the crawlers.  Of course you could go a step further and actually watch for specific spider IP addresses so you know that crawlers are getting the proper content.  For this you can use a URL rewriter and perform redirects to send crawlers to the appropriate content.

Using this tactic is probably safer because you can be sure that all the search engine crawlers in the US (as that’s where the main engines are based, and so are their crawlers) receive the US only pages.

For a list of Spider IP addresses, simply search Google or another engine.  There are thousands of websites with up-to-date lists.

What’s next?

Once you have the IP recognition up and working it’s quite simple.  No need to ask for user verification.  As long as they aren’t using a foreign proxy they will be served the proper content.

When a search engine crawler comes to index the pages, they will be served the US only site, and these are the results that will be displayed in the search engine.

When a non-US user selects the result from the SERPs they will automatically be redirected (via IP recognition) to the appropriate corresponding page in their locale (provided you have it configured that way).

another advantage of this system is that you may not need to use cookies – so if, in the past you’ve cookied users to help determine their country of origin, you no longer have to do this.

What does this all mean?

Let’s look at a typical scenario:  You have an e-commerce site for which you currently only serve US results and US pricing.  You know however that there is significant market potential in other English speaking countries like the UK and Australia.

You decide to go global, so the first thing you do is build out corresponding sections of the site to service UK and Australian visitors by providing them with the same content (product descriptions, images etc.) but with their own currency.

The next step would be to implement the above mentioned IP-to-country database and have the server check the IP of the visitor against the database to ensure they are serving the right content.

When a user of Google.com.au performs a search and sees your US page in the results.  They click on it and, through the IP recognition database, the site serves the proper Australian page, complete with Australian pricing and availability.  From here, they can navigate through the site, shopping or purchasing, complete the transaction and pay you without knowing that they were redirected.

But what do search engines think of this?

Because this isn’t considered a “sneaky redirect” you are fine.  A sneaky redirect, sometimes referred to as cloaking, is when you send visitors to different pages than where you send the search engine crawlers.  Since the crawlers are seeing the exact same content (except for the pricing) you don’t have to be concerned.  Your site isn’t going to get banned for cloaking or anything like that.  Plus you’ve also removed the chance of a duplicate content penalty because there is now no way for a search crawler to happen on other English content.

In other words, this is a legitimate form of redirection and one that is being used by more and more sites every day.

You may need to consult heavily with your hosting provider or web architect to make sure that the system works as it is supposed to but I can tell you from experience that it does.  I have seen many sites employ this exact strategy without any form of search engine retaliation.  Plus they’ve been able to serve content specific to a region, making it much easier to track visitors.

So before you think that you have to go and register a bunch of domains and arrange hosting all over the world, consider IP-to-country recognition.