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Thanks for this. Few clarifications please,

Isnt having a different journey for a user and bot cloaking? Will google not penalise a site for that? - To make it clear - we have a single website and based on the Geo of the user, we will filter product availability. If a customer is from state A, we will should "X" products and if a customer is from State B, we will show X+Y or X-Y. All the products will have a canonical URL as part of the sitemap, so even if the product is not navigatable through the hierarchy on the website, crawlers will be able to find it through the direct canonical URL.

Here us a link to the article where John Mueller from google has some comments on the subject - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-geolocation-redirects-are-okay-26933.html

I have picked excerpts from you reply where I have some doubts, great if you can throw more light into these?

1. 1. "It seems like you'll have to have the same products available in multiple stores. You will want them all indexed, but will have to work hard to differentiate them (different images, different copy, different Meta data) otherwise Google will probably pick one product from one store as 'canonical' and not index the rest, leading to unfair product purchasing (users only purchasing X product from Y store, never the others)"

   Since, we will have same (X products) across all our stores and across stores these products will have a single canonical URL, what will be the advantage of having different content by stores. we are thinking the content on the product pages will be the same, but, the availability of the product alone will differ based on geo. The sitemap will also remain the same across stores with the canonical product URLs

2. 2. "Will the bot crawl all pages across all the stores or since it will be geolocated to only one store, the content belonging to only one store will be indexed?" - No it won't. Every time Google crawls from a different data centre, they will think all your other pages are being redirected now and that part of the site is now closed. Exempt Googlebot's user-agent from your redirects or face Google's fiery wrath when they fail to index anything properly

Could you please explain a bit more on what do you mean by re-direct, as all products will exists in the website for a crawler to see if the canonical URL is used for crawling. Only the availability and the product visibility through the navigation journey will change based on geo.

Thank you for your time on this. Its extremely useful

Thanks - Costa

Hi there,

We are a Grocery co-operative retailer and have chain of stores owned by different people. We are building a new website, where we would geo-locate the closest store to the customer and direct them to a particular store (selected based on cookie and geo location). All our stores have a consistent range of products + Variation in 25% range. I have few questions

1. How to build a site-map. Since it will be mandatory for a store to be selected and same flow for the bot and user, should have all products across all stores in the sitemap? we are allowing users to find any products across all stores if they search by product identifier. But, they will be able to see products available in a particular store if go through the hierarchical journey of the website.

2. Will the bot crawl all pages across all the stores or since it will be geolocated to only one store, the content belonging to only one store will be indexed?

3. We are also allowing customers to search for older products which they might have bought few years and that are not part of out catalogue any more. these products will not appear on the online hierarchical journey but, customers will be able to search and find the products . Will this affect our SEO ranking?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks - Costa