Redirecting due to Locale

[jason77]

I have noticed some website will automatically forward you to a local subdomain....does this mean Google would only index the US version?

Maybe Googlebot would need to crawl from every country, not just from the USA?

[tedster]

This would depend on many factors - most especially what kind of "redirect" is in place technically. I've seen enterprises who effectively sealed off large chunks of their content from googlebot and all other spiders this way. I've seen those who wanted to do so for duplicate content reasons, and I've seen those who had unique content for each location and really wanted it all indexed -- but they made it imposible.

If the url does not change after the content negotiation phase, then the search engines will only see one version of the content. If the url does change, then there is at least a chance to offer spiders links to those location-specific pages if the site wants to.

I travel a lot these days, and I often feel manhandled by websites who assume they can geo-locate me and switch out content based on my IP address or browser configuration. The website cannot know the user's situation, and not everything that "can be" done technically should be done!

I feel this needs to be a user's choice.and not an automated "decision". By making it a user's choice, a site also opens up pathways for spiders quite naturally.