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Is it ever OK to exclude googlebot from geoip experience?

Web Design

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seoelevated Subscriber last edited by

We currently use geoip detection to present a dialog when customers access one of our country-specific sites other than the one matching their location, asking them to select whether to continue to that requested site, or else click a link to the site matching their IP location's country.The purpose is to diminish the likelihood of users having a bad experience if they accidentally shop a region's site only to discover when they get to checkout that they cannot complete the purchase and need to switch sites.

We are considering adding some logic to prevent this dialog from appearing if the user agent is a known search engine bot. The dialog serves no purpose to bots, and we are worried about its impact on crawling of our sites from servers outside the country-site's location.

That said, we don't want to incur any negative impact of perceived cloaking.

Is user agent-specific logic acceptable practice in this scenario?
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