Google Supports Locale-Adaptive Websites

6 Feb 2015

Google have announced that they will now be supporting the crawling and indexing of websites that adapt their content according to the geographical location of a user’s IP address and/or their language settings.

What Could this Mean for you & your Website?

When these changes are implemented, some websites may see a shift in their Google rankings as they will be crawled and indexed differently than before these changes.

Google emphasises that it still encourages businesses to use separate URLs for different languages – this is still the best way to get diverse content indexed, but it’s a move towards recognising those websites that dynamically adapt their features according to IP location and language settings.

What are the Development Possibilities?

There is often confusion about what this actually includes in terms of the functionality of a website. It’s not the same as having multiple URLs that automatically change depending on where the user is visiting your website from.

There are a range of features that can be included in the design and development of your website that don’t include having separate URLs, but still allow you to tailor what your users see depending on their location and language. Here are a few examples of features that can be adaptive – this should give you an idea of what can be done with this type of web development: