Is Employing Geo Location Techniques Considered Cloaking?

Posted in FAQs

Some people are concerned about dynamically changing content on a web page based on the visitor’s location (i.e. implementing geo location techniques) for fear that they will be penalized by Google for doing so. So, is it acceptable to use geo location or is it considered cloaking in Google’s eyes?

It’s perfectly fine and in fact Google themselves employ geo location on their pages all the time. When it becomes an issue is when you show different content to the Google Bots IP ranges… but when you are translating an IP Address to a geographic location (and not a device) there is nothing to worry about… Google Bots will just be treated as a U.S. web surfer, as they should.

Here’s a video below saying basically what I said above straight from the horse’s mouth (well, from Matt Cutt’s mouth):