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I want to list certain things for different cities. In other words, when someone from New York visits my website, I want to list "Best Language Courses in New York".

I can do that by using PHP composer and installing geoip2/geoip2 (https://github.com/maxmind/GeoIP2-php), I can easily get visitor's location, timezone etc.

I know there are numerous tools/plugins showing different prices for different countries. So, something similar must be being used.

My concern is that I'll be getting visitors' IP addresses without their consent. I won't be using or storing this information; instead, I'll only be listing specific things according to visitor location.

Is it possible that this will harm my SEO score or cause me to be blacklisted? Would it be safe in Google's eyes?

Thank you alot.

Update: I'm considering creating this field on the sidebar in blogposts as a sticky element (not more than 100 words). So, It'll make up a small portion of the page. If the user's location can't be determined by ipaddress, I want to show the most popular courses. It'll be a dynamic content and will change for each visitors so I wonder what the search engines would index for this field.

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    What are you going to show if the user's location can't be determined? What do you want search engines to see? Do you want the list of language courses in New York to be indexed in search engines?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Apr 25 at 14:40
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    Every web server and hence site has access to their visitor's IP address - that's how HTTP requests are handled. Web servers also store this information in server logs, which analytics use as well. So using geolocation to direct visitors, which is quite common, wouldn't get you blacklisted or harm your SEO outright. You might want to consider that the Googlebot would crawl and index based on the URL, so use regional URLs and return common content for those.
    – dan ♦
    Apr 25 at 14:54
  • Rather than adding details in comments, please edit your question to add requested information. You can then comment saying that you have done so. Comments here may get hidden by "show more comments" or could be deleted without notice. Editing updates into your question ensures that they don't get lost and that everybody who wants to answer the question sees them.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Apr 25 at 15:38

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