So, we have an international site with multiple subdomains for each language. We have hreflang markup in place (+ sitemaps), but we also detect where users come from and redirect them to appropriate sudbomains.
What's important is that we're setting a cookie with following logic:
- If EN user
with no cookie
comes to fr.example.com URL >don't redirect him
- If FR user
with no cookie
comes to example.com >redirect him to fr.example.com
- If FR user
with EN cookie
comes to example.com >don't redirect him
- If FR user
with or without cookie
comes to de.example.com >don't redirect him
If users pick languages from a language menu on the site, language always changes to the one they select. But if a user sets a FR language (and comes to a FR subdomain), if he then pastes an EN URL in browser's address bar, he's being redirected to FR subdomain.
First of all, don't blame me for that logics and don't say that automatic redirects are bad for UX; it wasn't me who made it like that, and I'm just trying to find if it may be harmful to our SEO because it may mislead Google Bot who may come from various international IPs.
What I suspect, is that if Google Bot comes to the site, it crawls the pages from links and hreflang links it finds, and if he once visits a FR page and then he tries to visit EN page not though our language selection menu, he's getting redirected to FR page and this might probably hurt the SEO and our rankings.
Questions:
- Is this redirect scenario bad for SEO and our SERP rankings?
- If YES, how exactly it is hurting us?