Robert Longfield - 5:16 pm
Q: Further on Geotargetting. I run a multinational site with about 12 different languages being supported. We are implimenting geotrageting so users are directed to the appropriate language page for their country. The concern of some is that Google may penalize me...
John Mueller - 5:35 pm
A: I would recommend not redirecting users based on their location. This can be a bad user experience. It's better to allow a user to choose his version based on his searches.
Rand: Such brazen hypocrisy! Google can geo-target its search results, geo-target its homepage, geotarget many of its other service pages, but heavens forbid anyone else do it. This is ridiculous. Robert - I'd say to simply do a quick check before you redirect your users. If their browser accepts cookies, feel free to drop one, re-direct them to the appropriate page and let your user data, feedback and analytics tell you whether or not it's the best experience or not. If the browser doesn't take cookies, drop them on an international landing page that lets them choose their country/language - this will also work well for search engine bots (which don't accept cookies), and will be able to find all of your country-targeted content.
Rather than attack the content provided by the Googlers directly, I thought it would be more valuable to provide the answers from Google alongside the answers I would have given. Hopefully, in this fashion, I can better explain my fears about how Google is communicating with website owners and marketers.