IP Geolocation and Googlebot

Question

For a site that displays events near a city based on the user's IP address, how should Googlebot (or other crawlers) be handled? The site has many different pages and most of them use location-based content.

According to this, treating Googlebot differently than a regular user is cloaking:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-google-defines-ip-delivery.html

The problem with treating Googlebot as a regular user is that only events in Mountain View would be indexed. (Note that changing the user's location on the site is not performed by navigable links, but by a location autocomplete feature, but there is an All Locations link too).

If the All Locations link was available on the site, would Google navigate that and index all the pages under that setting? Would that result in duplicate content?

What is the best solution?

Answer 1

The only problem could happen to you:

if the bot coming from the given IP gets different (not exactly the same) content, as a human user, who's coming from the same IP.

Google crawls with different user agents and is pretty advanced in realizing such behavior. This constellation is called cloaking and is a violation against Google's webmaster guidelines.

But as long you deliver your content not dependently on user agent, but ONLY on IP - there is nothing, which could cause troubles.