: Will Googlebot have trouble crawling a site if we have such international redirects based on location and cookie? So, we have an international site with multiple subdomains for each language. We

@BetL925

Your redirects for users without cookies are a bad idea. Googlebot never sends cookies, but Google has data centers around the world. When Googlebot crawls from a data center in France, it won't be able to get to your English website and your English website could get dropped from the Google index.

Location based redirects are also problematic for real users. Somebody who speaks only English who is vacationing in France will be unable to use your site. IP address locations are often also wrong 10% of the time. You should not use them to make automatic decisions for the user.

Instead you should place notices on your site when you suspect the user is in the wrong place. Such messages should be in the language that you have detected for the user. (In this case French):


You appear to be located in France but this is the English website. Click here to view this page in French.


or


You have a French web browser that is sending a FR-fr Accept-Language header but this is the English website. Click here to view this page in French.

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@Ann8826881

A couple of key points about Googlebot probably answers your questions...


Googlebot does not use cookies. It is completely stateless. Every visit is a "no cookie" visit.
Googlebot predominantly visits from the US. Googlebot is always(?) seen as a US visitor. So, any automated GeoIP redirection has potential to cause problems for SEO.

EDIT: (Jan 2015) It does appear that Googlebot can now crawl using non-US IP addresses: Locale-aware crawling by Googlebot and Crawling and indexing of locale-adaptive pages



If EN user with no cookie comes to fr.example.com URL > don't redirect him


If by "EN user" you also include "US user" then you should be OK.


if Google Bot ... visits a FR page and then he tries to visit EN page not though our language selection menu, he's getting redirected to FR page


Googlebot (and most search engine bots) don't work like that. They are stateless (as mentioned above). They first build a bunch of URLs, having found them by whatever means. Then they index them, individually, page by page, in no particular order. No state is passed from one visit to the next (the same as a user clicking on a search result for the very first time).

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