Colin's Blog My thoughts on everything.

Excluding Search Engines from Geo-Targetting Techniques

I've spent the last few days transforming MainStWeb.com into a true local search engine, powered by the Praized API and, overall, I'm pretty pleased with the result.

One of the custom things I've added is IP-based geolocation. This means that every visitor gets a custom home-page based on their IP address. Very cool because it makes the site instantly relevant no matter where in North America you happen to be.

My only concern is that Google happens to be in Mountain View, California. Obviously, I don't want MainStWeb's indexed pages to be skewed towards Mountain View. Obvious fix is to programatically exclude search engines from the geo-targetting algo.

Except that I also know that Google frowns upon efforts to present a different experience to the GoogleBot than to real people.

So what to do? Would the search engine exclusion be considered acceptable in the eyes of Matt Cutts, et al?

Related posts:

1. Search Logs…
2. Index first, rank later!
3. Best. Hack. Ever. (making Google and Yahoo play nice)
4. Twitterbowl Analysis
5. Google makes a change that just makes sense