When users entering domain www.example.com, it has to check for the country from the IP and should redirected to some other language specific domain eg: www.example.co.in. Will the search engine crawler recognize both www.example.com and www.example.co.in? Will this effect the search engine ranking?
Someone could guide me on the disadvantages of using IP masking.
Thanks & Regards, Kavitha
I think it is interesting to note that Google returns HTTP/1.1 302 Found to redirect you to your country specific domain when you visit google.com from any country outside the US.
I suggest reading Matt Cutt's article (a Google software engineer) on how Google handles the 302 Redirect: SEO advice: discussing 302 redirects.
Different search engines handle the 302 redirect in a different way. Google also makes a distinction between redirects towards the same domain, and off-domain redirects. In general, using redirects will make your SEO more complicated and very tricky, and you risk having your original domain ignored by search engines.
You may also want to check out the following article on how the Google crawler handles the various HTTP status codes: Google Webmaster Central - HTTP status codes.
HTTP/1.1 302 Found code is used for temporary redirects, so it could work. However, it is not recommended as Google will be unable to identify domain example.com with any content at other domains - basically, what I am saying is that Google spider will be redirected too based on its IP and only (presumably) English content will be indexed for this domain. If that's OK with you, then you are set.
Please, be advised this is a big no-no(!) from usability perspective and users everywhere hate this behaviour. Google offers alternative link to go to google.com even after redirection.