Hi,

I've been trying to figure out which is the right forum to ask this in for days, but after reading a pretty active discussion about "bad neighborhoods," with some really smart people contributing, this seems like the best place. If I'm wrong sorry to annoy!

My site goes live in 9 days, and while I'm trying to keep it a secret until I launch, this is an important question, and probably my biggest hold up to getting the site finished. Along with the usual html content, I also want to run a proxy server on my web site. Only what I have in mind is a bit "special." First, I only want to allow access from certain countries: China would be the #1 among them, parts of Africa, a few countries in South America. Basically, I want to use my idle cycles to let people get around state-imposed censorship, but I don't want people to use my server to spam Wikipedia. I want to display a list of open proxy servers also. But I have a partial list of IP addresses of government agencies that are involved with censorship - I want to send them completely different content. Since many of them block access to any site that mentions the word "democracy" or "proxy" I would like to serve up a completely different set of pages to them.

Now I know cloaking = banning, and I suspect proxies tell the world you're generally involved with stuff you shouldn't be doing, probably pirate software or something.

So can anybody give me any advice here?

Region specific targeting is not penalized by Google at all. As long as the code is nothing shady and you use an actual script you should be good. But stop worrying a lot of websites have different webpages for each region. Even if you do get penalized, though highly unlikely, you should contact Google and get everything cleared up.

Thank You

by using geo-targetting based on IP, SE bots will only ever get content aimed at the US simply because that's where their IPs are based.

This sounds like good news!! I sort of thought using geo-coded IP cloaking would have me banned. Whether I'm trying to do something deceptive or not probably depends on your point of view, but I believe access to information and knowledge is a fundamental human right. Now that I've committed to running a server, I feel it's my obligation to also use it to help people. This isn't as pressing as what's going on in Darfur, but this is something I have most of the skills to be able to make a difference in the world.