Redirect based on location best practice clarification?

[blackrails]

Hi, i have a question that i have seen some other have also had. The question is what is the best practice to serve the location specific page to the user (based on their location)?

This post (http://www.seomoz.org/q/redirecting-users-based-on-location) suggests against automatically redirecting the user based on IP address. I guess the primary concern is that Google bot will also be redirected in this case...

I see a number of well known sites use automatic redirect based on location. Take Urbanspoon for example (http://www.urbanspoon.com/), they use a 302 redirect to redirect to location specific page.

• Do they not redirect Google bot? Is there any way to test this?
• Can creating a rule to exclude crawlers from redirect cause SEO problems? How?

Another example that i am somewhat confused as to how it works effectively is groupon.com.au

It selects my closest city (i assume using IP), however the URL stays as the root URL. For example, i typed in http://www.groupon.com.au/ and it stays as http://www.groupon.com.au/ with the city chosen as "Melbourne". The canonical url for this page is the root URL (ie http://www.groupon.com.au/).

If you then select "change city" and click the same city (ie Melbourne), it redirects to http://www.groupon.com.au/deals/melbourne. Canonical URL of this page is http://www.groupon.com.au/deals/melbourne.

• How is this not duplicate content?

Can you please advise on the best way to redirect (ideally automatically), to provide the best user experience, while still having Google bot able to crawl the site effectively?

Thanks

[AlanBleiweiss]

Have a script to detect if Googlebot is present. If it is, have the main site, without geo-location personalization. If it's not, redirect using 302, and canonicalize just like Groupon. This is NOT a violation of Google's TOS, because you are doing it to provide personalized results for site visitors, and not doing it to trick Google.  Geo-redirection is a perfectly valid user experience concept under those circumstances.

As for Groupon leaving the URL at the root, they're just populating the content behind the scenes (at the code level) for those users.  Again, it's for a high value user experience, not to trick search engines.