Geo-location by state/store

[Hanuman88]

Hi there,

We are a Grocery co-operative retailer and have chain of stores owned by different people. We are building a new website, where we would geo-locate the closest store to the customer and direct them to a particular store (selected based on cookie and geo location). All our stores have a consistent range of products + Variation in 25% range. I have few questions

1. How to build a site-map. Since it will be mandatory for a store to be selected and same flow for the bot and user, should have all products across all stores in the sitemap? we are allowing users to find any products across all stores if they search by product identifier. But, they will be able to see products available in a particular store if go through the hierarchical journey of the website.

2. Will the bot crawl all pages across all the stores or since it will be geolocated to only one store, the content belonging to only one store will be indexed?

3. We are also allowing customers to search for older products which they might have bought few years and that are not part of out catalogue any more. these products will not appear on the online hierarchical journey but, customers will be able to search and find the products . Will this affect our SEO ranking?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks - Costa

[Everett]

If you consistently see the IP address and redirect, or change content, based only on that then you will want to exempt Googlebot from those personalizations in one way or another. There are many options to this, like blocking the resources that handle this (i.e. the JavaScript.js file associated with personalization based on history or geo-location), or what was suggested above. Blocking that piece of script in the robots.txt file is less likely to be seen as cloaking.

All of this begs the question though: If you're looking at the IP, then setting a cookie, then updating the content based on the cookie, it shouldn't be an issue in the first place. Googlebot isn't accepting your cookies. So if I were to browse in Incognito mode using Chrome (and thus not accept cookies), would I see the same site and product assortments no matter which location I was in? If that's the case, maybe you don't have a problem. This is pretty easy to test.

Ultimately, I think you're going to want a single product page for each Sku, rather than one for each product at each location. The content, pricing, etc.. can be updated by location if they have a cookie, but the URL should probably never change - and the content shouldn't change by IP if they don't have a cookie.

1. Check IP

2. Embed their location in a cookie

3. Set cookie

4. If cookie is excepted and thus exists, do personalize.

If the cookie does not exist, do not personalize. You can show a message that says you must accept cookies to get the best experience, but don't make it block any major portion of the content.

[Hanuman88]

Thanks for this. Few clarifications please,

Isnt having a different journey for a user and bot cloaking? Will google not penalise a site for that? - To make it clear - we have a single website and based on the Geo of the user, we will filter product availability. If a customer is from state A, we will should "X" products and if a customer is from State B, we will show X+Y or X-Y. All the products will have a canonical URL as part of the sitemap, so even if the product is not navigatable through the hierarchy on the website, crawlers will be able to find it through the direct canonical URL.

Here us a link to the article where John Mueller from google has some comments on the subject - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-geolocation-redirects-are-okay-26933.html

I have picked excerpts from you reply where I have some doubts, great if you can throw more light into these?

1. 1. "It seems like you'll have to have the same products available in multiple stores. You will want them all indexed, but will have to work hard to differentiate them (different images, different copy, different Meta data) otherwise Google will probably pick one product from one store as 'canonical' and not index the rest, leading to unfair product purchasing (users only purchasing X product from Y store, never the others)"

   Since, we will have same (X products) across all our stores and across stores these products will have a single canonical URL, what will be the advantage of having different content by stores. we are thinking the content on the product pages will be the same, but, the availability of the product alone will differ based on geo. The sitemap will also remain the same across stores with the canonical product URLs

2. 2. "Will the bot crawl all pages across all the stores or since it will be geolocated to only one store, the content belonging to only one store will be indexed?" - No it won't. Every time Google crawls from a different data centre, they will think all your other pages are being redirected now and that part of the site is now closed. Exempt Googlebot's user-agent from your redirects or face Google's fiery wrath when they fail to index anything properly

Could you please explain a bit more on what do you mean by re-direct, as all products will exists in the website for a crawler to see if the canonical URL is used for crawling. Only the availability and the product visibility through the navigation journey will change based on geo.

Thank you for your time on this. Its extremely useful

Thanks - Costa

[effectdigital]

0. "We are a Grocery co-operative retailer and have chain of stores owned by different people. We are building a new website, where we would geo-locate the closest store to the customer and direct them to a particular store (selected based on cookie and geo location). All our stores have a consistent range of products + Variation in 25% range. I have few questions" - make sure you exempt Googlebot's user-agent from your geo-based redirects otherwise the crawling of your site will end up in a big horrible mess

1. "How to build a site-map. Since it will be mandatory for a store to be selected and same flow for the bot and user, should have all products across all stores in the sitemap? we are allowing users to find any products across all stores if they search by product identifier. But, they will be able to see products available in a particular store if go through the hierarchical journey of the website." - any pages you want Google to index should be in your XML sitemap. Any pages you don't want Google ti index should not be in there (period). If a URL uses a canonical tag to point somewhere else (and thus marks itself as NON-canonical) it shouldn't be in the XML sitemap. If a URL is blocked via robots.txt or Meta no-index directives, it shouldn't be in the XML sitemap.  If a URL results in an error or redirect, it shouldn't be in your XML sitemap.The main thing to concern yourself with, is creating a 'seamless' view  of indexation for Google. It seems like you'll have to have the same products available in multiple stores. You will want them all indexed, but will have to work hard to differentiate them (different images, different copy, different Meta data) otherwise Google will probably pick one product from one store as 'canonical' and not index the rest, leading to unfair product purchasing (users only purchasing X product from Y store, never the others). In reality, setting out to build a site which such highly divergent duplication is never going to yield great results, you'll just have to be aware of that from the outset

2. "Will the bot crawl all pages across all the stores or since it will be geolocated to only one store, the content belonging to only one store will be indexed?" - No it won't. Every time Google crawls from a different data centre, they will think all your other pages are being redirected now and that part of the site is now closed. Exempt Googlebot's user-agent from your redirects or face Google's fiery wrath when they fail to index anything properly

3. "We are also allowing customers to search for older products which they might have bought few years and that are not part of out catalogue any more. these products will not appear on the online hierarchical journey but, customers will be able to search and find the products . Will this affect our SEO ranking?" - If the pages are orphaned except in the XML sitemap, their rankings will go down over time. It won't necessarily hurt the rest of your site, though. Sometimes crappy results are better than no results at all!

Hope that helps