Thank you for the reply. I checked the link you posted, good information there. The only thing I was thinking about: The scenario John described wasn't necessarily content hidden behind an accessible dropdown. I'm still wondering if this makes any difference to Google. Hiding content to users completely or giving them the choice to display it by clicking the dropdown button seems different to me. One could also do this using CSS, just like with CSS dropdown navigation. There wouldn't even have to be any JS involved. Seems all pretty grey-hat to me though.

I've come across a method implemented by some SEO agencies to fill up pages with somehow relevant text and hide it behind a javascript dropdown. Does Google fall for such cheap tricks?

You can see this method used on these pages for example (just scroll down to the bottom) - it's all in German, but you get the idea I guess:

http://www.insider-boersenbrief.de/

http://www.deko-und-kerzenshop.de/

How is you experience with this way of adding content to a site? Do you think it is valuable or will it get penalised?

Thank you for your answers. As far as I can see, everything is getting crawled, but I also submitted an XML sitemap via webmaster tools. I decided to disable the cookie redirect for a few weeks to see if there are any changes in ranking.

My clients business is divided in chain stores. All stores are set under the same franchise. There is one domain www.company.com with branches like www.company.com/location1/content and www.company.com/location2/content etc. I've taken care of duplicate content issues with rel="canonical" and duplicate page titles are also not a concern, anymore.

Right now the concept is like this: If you visit the site for the first time you get to choose between the locations. Then a cookie is set and once you revisit www.company.com it will redirect you via a php header command to the location stored in your cookie: www.company.com/location1/content.

My question is if this might hurt rankings in some kind of way as these aren't permanent redirects with a 301 but rather individual ones, based on your cookie.