Google Now Encourages Crawling & Indexing Locale-Adaptive Web Pages

Certain web pages change their content based on the IP origin or language settings. These web-pages are known as locale-adaptive web pages. Some businesses serve audience from various locations, countries and cultures. Serving different ethnics and cultural background demands a certain level of flexibility in terms of content. For instance, a person who is native of France is more likely to prefer a webpage in French rather than any other language. In order to meet this demand, the website must accommodate the interests of people from different locations and mete out content that meets their requirements. Google recently announced its support for website that change the content based on the user’s country, origin, or language settings and thus provide a good user experience. Previously, Google just focused on the English version of the website.

With the new rules coming in place, Google will be able to handle content in different languages by sending GoogleBot from different IPs across the world. The crawling of GoogleBot is accomplished by two methods:

a) Geo-distributed crawling

In this case, the GoogleBot uses IP addresses that appear to be coming from outside the USA in addition to the IP addresses that it has been currently using.

b) Language dependent crawling

In this case, GoogleBot starts crawling webpages that use a language other than English with the help of an Accept-language HTTP header in the request.

Google strongly recommends using different URLs or TLDs for web pages that have content in a different language or is serving different countries or ethnicities. In order for all variants of the website to rank, Google recommends using separate URLs as it promotes effective sharing of content and interaction with users.

The new technique by Google is sure to help the search engine deploy locale-adaptive techniques. New crawling configurations are automatically enabled by Google for the web pages that are envisaged to be locale-adaptive.