How well does Google's "Locale-aware crawling by Googlebot" work?

[Veva]

Hello,

In January of this year Google introduced "Locale-aware crawling by Googlebot."

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=e

Google uses different crawl settings for sites that cannot have separate URLs for each locale. .........   This is basically for sites that dynamically render contend on the same URL depending on the locale and language (IP) of the visitor. If e.g. a visitor was coming from France, the targeted page would load in french. If a visitor was coming from the US the same page would load in English on the same URL.

Does anyone have any experience with this setup and how well it works?

How well do the different versions of a page get indexed, and how well do those pages rank?

In the example above, does the french content get indexed correctly?

Many thanks!

[Veva]

Many thanks! I was looking for examples of issues with this setup.

Some stakeholders find the dynamic solution appealing (as it is much easier to set up for us), thereby forgoing the opportunity to set up the site correctly for international indexing and ranking. I would like to be able to illustrate the potential shortcomings.

Many thanks again!

[DirkC]

No personal experience with it - but seen already some cases on the Q&A where it generated problems. In one specific case all traffic outside Ireland was shown a default language page - inside Ireland the full content was available. None of the content was indexed by Google until the ip blocking was removed.

The note on the page you mention already gives a hint:

IMPORTANT: We continue to support and recommend using separate locale URL configurations and annotating them with rel=alternate hreflang annotations.

If your website has pages that return different content based on the perceived country or preferred language of the visitor (i.e., you have locale-adaptive pages), Google might not crawl, index, or rank all of your locale-adaptive content.

You can try it but you run a huge risk that your content will not be indexed or only partially indexed. Better to use the hreflang solution - as propose by Google.

Dirk