New client, fashion retailer with 6 country sites in subfolders. They auto-redirect every visitor based on IP. US IP goes to /us/, German IP goes to /de/, and so on.
Problem is Googlebot crawls mostly from US IPs, so it barely sees the other versions. GSC for /de/ and /fr/ shows a lot of “Page with redirect” and the local versions barely rank in their own countries.
They refuse to fully remove the redirect because conversion drops when people land on the wrong currency.
What I’m proposing:
– no forced redirect, show a banner suggesting the local site instead
– keep hreflang and x-default pointing to a country selector
– remember the user’s choice in a cookie
Has anyone won this argument with a client? I’d love real numbers on what happened to conversions when you swapped a hard redirect for a banner. That’s the only thing that will convince them.
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