Re-Direct Users But Don't Affect Googlebot

[eventurerob]

This is a fairly technical question... I have a site which has 4 subdomains, all targeting a specific language. The brand owners don't want German users to see the prices on the French sub domain and are forcing users into a re-direct to the relevant subddomain, based on their IP address. If a user comes from a different country, (ie the US) they are forced on the UK sub domain. The client is insistent on keeping control of who sees what (I know that's a debate in it's own right), but these re-directs we're implementing to make that happen, are really making it difficult to get all the subdomains indexed as I think googlebot is also getting re-directed and is failing to do it's job. Is there are a way of re-directing users, but not Googlebot?

[SanketPatel]

Hi Alex,

Just check out awesome post by Gianluca on international seo issue.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

In above post, read out "h_reflang_" tag implementation which helpful in your case.

[irvingw]

yes u can cookie the user based on IP and send them to the appropriate place. since bots aren't browser based they can't accept cookies and see the default content. dunno why they need to do this though