Location of the GoogleBot

Hi everybody,

i have a question about the googlebot. I just started a new website which is available ion two different languages. Depending on the GeoIp my visitors are redirected to a german site (when they are located in Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Swiss) or to the english version of it when they live in the rest of the world.

Now i am curious to know if the GoogleBot crawls my site from US-located servers only. That would meen it can't index the german site..

Anybody knows how the googlebot can find my non-english contend?

Regards, Blaukreuz

The most SEO friendly way to manage a location based redirection is to have a language/country selection menu in every page of your site linking to the equivalent langage version of each specific page. Meaning:

1. User A lands in your site with US IP.
2. Your server redirects the user to the English version.
3. Then the user can find a country selection menu in your header or footer. If he choses to see the German version, he can do so and navigate to the German version without being redirected to the English version again.

That way you are being user friendy and search engine friendly, because the users are not forced to stay in a specific language version, and the search engines can navigate through every version of your site and crawl them all.

You should definetely use hreflang tags too, so you can tell Google that you want your German version to be displayed in Google.de and your English version in Google.com.