Allowing correct crawlers for GeoIP Redirect

[michaelpw]

Hi All,

I am working on an international site and we have started running into issues with crawlers successfully crawling the site.

GeoIPEnable On

Redirect one country

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^US$
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Host} !.nexcesscdn.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://us.website.com/ [R,L]

The main reason for working on a hard GEOIP redirect would be that we are unable to show certain products in certain regions, the customer should not be given the option which is best practice.

Can anyone advise?

Thanking in advance.

[katemorris]

Actually, geo-basedIP redirects are still a very bad idea from a user and bot perspective.

1. While Google has said it is testing crawling from other areas, they still primarilycrawl from the US. If you do Geo-basedredirects, they will only ever see the US content.
2. Users travel. People travel. Assuming a user should only see a certain set of content based on their physical location is assuming too much.

• Use case in the consumer field: While attending a friend's wedding in London, I could not get to the US version of a site where I wanted to buy furniture to be delivered in a few weeks.
• Use case in business: Users travel for business all the time. If they are visiting a headquarters in another country but researching a topic for use in their home country, they might be seeing the "wrong content."

Rather than assuming, use IP detection to ask the user to set their location. "We see you are in the UK, do you want to set that as your preferred location?" Once they choose their location, a cookie is set and that is all that user sees from then on out, until they change that setting in the footer or in their account.