IP Delivery

Serving different content by IP address is neutral in itself. Showing a visitor in Germany euro pricing, or defaulting a store locator to the nearest city, is ordinary personalisation.

It becomes cloaking when the different treatment is targeted at search engines rather than at users — detecting Googlebot's address ranges and serving it something a visitor would never see. That is one of the few practices that reliably earns a manual action, because it defeats the premise that a search engine can evaluate what it indexes.

The test is not the technique but the question: does a crawler see what a visitor from the same place would see? If yes, it is personalisation. If no, it is cloaking regardless of intent.

The common failure is not malicious. A site redirects every visitor to their local version by IP, and a crawler — which crawls predominantly from one location — only ever reaches one of them. The other markets exist, are perfectly good, and are invisible.

It gets worse with a redirect that ignores the path. Sending a German visitor from /pricing to /de/ rather than /de/pricing means every deep link from search lands on a homepage, for humans as well as crawlers.

Give each market its own URL and let both people and crawlers reach all of them. Connect the versions with hreflang so search engines know they are the same content for different audiences.

Then, if you want to help visitors find their version, suggest rather than redirect: a dismissible banner offering the local site, remembered in a cookie once chosen. It keeps every version crawlable, avoids trapping a visitor who deliberately wants another market's page, and does not depend on IP geolocation being right — which, for VPNs, corporate networks and mobile carriers, it frequently is not.

The case against IP-based redirection is not only that crawlers see one version. It is that IP geolocation is wrong often enough to matter.

Mobile carriers route traffic through gateways in other cities and sometimes other countries. Corporate VPNs place employees wherever the exit node is. Privacy VPNs are deliberate misdirection. Cloud and datacentre ranges resolve to wherever the provider registered them.

Every one of those visitors gets redirected somewhere they did not ask for, and a hard redirect gives them no way back — the local site redirects them again the moment they navigate. This is the practical argument for suggesting rather than forcing: a banner offering the local version is right for the majority and harmless for everyone else.