Don’t Redirect Google For Geotargeting Purposes

Google’s John Mueller issued a PSA, public service announcement, the other day on Twitter saying not to redirect Googlebot when using geotargeting redirection techniques. I mean, he said if you do this, it might cause big indexing issues for Google Search.

John wrote “if you’re using an app / service that does geotargeting by redirecting your URLs, make sure not to redirect to Google if you want your pages indexed.” He added “and if you run such a service, check for things like this, especially if the rule is for countries where Google crawls from.”

He even shared a censored screenshot to protect the identify of the site:

If you’re using an app / service that does geotargeting by redirecting your URLs, make sure not to redirect to Google if you want your pages indexed. (And if you run such a service, check for things like this, especially if the rule is for countries where Google crawls from.) pic.twitter.com/qN1eJx9vJa

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) September 23, 2021

We’ve covered this topic before – but it is obviously a big enough issue that John felt the need to post this PSA.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Simchat Torah.