Google: Don't Redirect By IP Location

Jul 11, 2017 - 8:07 am 8 by

Google Broken

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that is not always the best cast to redirect users (or bots) by the location of the IP address of that user or bot. He said it can often not only "break indexing" but also "frustrate users."

As you know, most of the time, GoogleBot crawls from the US. GoogleBot wants to see what US users see and if you redirect US users differently than your German or French users, that can cause issues. Google has ways of handling geolocation management from ccTLDs, Google Search Console settings, hreflang for language handling and more.

Redirecting by IP location is something Google says try not to do.

Here is John's tweet:

Here is more context:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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