Geo targeting in geomarketing and internet marketing is the method of determining the geolocation of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP or other criteria. A common usage of geo targeting is found in internet television with sites such as iPlayer and Hulu restricting content to those geolocated in specific countries. Use of proxy servers and virtual private networks may give a false location.
IP delivery for search engine optimization (SEO) is the method of delivering different content to search engine spiders (also known as robots and crawlers) than to human visitors. The determination if the visitor is a known search engine spider is done based on the IP address. SEOs compare the visitor’s IP address with their list of IP addresses, which are known to be servers that are owned by a search engine and used to run their crawler applications (spiders). The delivery of different content to search engine spiders than to human visitors is called cloaking and is against most search engines’ webmaster guidelines.
Although the search engine guidelines seem to imply that any type of cloaking is bad, there are cases where cloaking might be legitimate. The subject is very controversial and SEO experts continue to debate about when cloaking might be acceptable and when not.
“Cloaking” via IP delivery works differently from cloaking via “user agent”. While IP address spoofing is harder than user-agent spoofing and more reliable, it is also harder to keep the list of IP addresses used by search engines for their crawlers up-to-date. An outdated list with active crawler IP addresses missing enables the search engines to detect the cloaking and may result in a removal of the site from the search engine’s index.
