IP Auto-Redirect Trap
Forcing visitors to a country version based on their IP address, which also redirects crawlers and can therefore prevent whole language sections from ever being indexed.
Analogy Mental model
A doorman with one rule: anyone who looks American goes into the American room and the doors to the German and Japanese rooms stay locked. The building inspector happens to be American, so his report states that no other rooms exist.
In practice What you actually do
Serve every URL normally to everyone and offer a choice instead. Detect the likely country, then show a discreet non-blocking bar offering the localised version and its currency, with an option to stay. The visitor decides; the crawler is never obstructed.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Third-party plugins that swap currency and language automatically are a common cause of this, and the result is that the localised pages never get indexed, which is invisible unless you check. Load your own non-domestic URL from a foreign IP and see what happens.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →