Google’s John Mueller cleared up confusion surrounding redirecting users by IP location, stating that it should be avoided in most cases.
John Mueller tweeted:
“I’d avoid redirects by IP location in most cases; it’s easy to break indexing & frustrate users.”
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) June 20, 2017
Site owners might adopt the practice of redirecting users or bots based on IP location, assuming it is an appropriate way to handle traffic from different countries. For example, redirecting users with a Canadian IP address to a different page than users in the US.
Mueller suggests that this could negatively affect both indexing and user experience. Redirecting users also involves redirecting bots, so if Googlebot is redirected, it could “break indexing” because Googlebot would not be able to crawl and index the rest of the pages.
For geotargeting searchers, consider the following advice from John Mueller. Recommended best practices include using country code TLDs and configuring your Search Console settings.
