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My client wants country-based domains for their customers. For example, all customers from UK will be taken to the .co.uk site, even if they visit the .com site. And same for other countries.

I have used IP redirection for this. Redirection is OK.

Since all non-UK IPs are redirected to .com site, how will Google index the .co.uk site?

If I submit a sitemap of .co.uk and .com sites to Google and have country-based IP redirection in place, will Google (or any other bot) be able to visit?

My understanding is, Google bots have IPs from USA.

And, .co.uk and .com sites have 80 % content same. Will it impact on duplicate content?

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Google doesn't like automatic redirects based on geo-ip, because on this way the Googlebot and human visitors are forced to visit certain site/folder. Beside of this, wrong handling of similar content on different tld-domains will cause duplicate content issues.

The strategy Google recommends looks like:

  • main domain with hreflangs,
  • on first visit of human visitor - set cookie with country/language information, on further visits - redirect visitor according to cookie settings,
  • googlebot doesn't work with cookies - it entries everywhere it wants and reads sites only according to hreflangs.
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  • Client wants to force each visitor to country based domain strictly. I guess they got something to hide. – Adarsh Khatri Apr 25 '19 at 23:50

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