International SEO - Alternatives to Automatic IP re-direct

[SEOCT]

Hello,

When doing international SEO I've read that it's not good practice to automatically re-direct users to the correct part of the website based on their IP address. But what alternatives are there to this?

Let's say you're targeting the US and the UK through multiregional SEO. What can you do to ensure that users from the US go to the US sub-directory and that users from the UK go to the UK sub-directory?

In Moz's international SEO guide it says that:

"If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused. Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content."

Can anyone explain this further?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance

[NickSamuel]

Hi there,

Great question!

I must admit that some of the wording for this confused me as well...

I've pasted below some snippets from Google's official guidelines on managing multilingual websites and added my own thoughts here and there: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en/

"If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice." Let the user switch the page language If you have multiple versions of a page:

• Consider adding hyperlinks to other language versions of a page. That way users can click to choose a different language version of the page.
• Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.

Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused.

"If you prefer to dynamically change content or reroute the user based on language settings, be aware that Google might not find and crawl all your variations. This is because the Googlebot crawler usually originates from the USA. In addition, the crawler sends HTTP requests without setting Accept-Language in the request header."

Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content.

No specific answer or single quote to copy but this covers on-page annotation and XML sitemaps: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

- Hope this helps as a starter!

Nick

[NickSamuel]

Also just to add:

""If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused." It's about giving the user choice and not force redirecting them aka it's ok to query the language and suggest it, but not force it.

For example, GoogleBot is mostly from USA, so it would be auto-forced to US content options which theoretically means it could miss other versions.

If you are redirected to a particularly language version, you need to give the user the option to switch...

[SEOCT]

Thanks for the detailed response Nick - great summary!

"If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused."

I presume web developers would know how to do this?