This is not a new topic, we’ve been saying this for probably over a decade and even Matt Cutts posted a video answer on it in 2013. But hey – John Mueller from Google answered it again. You are allowed to do geolocation based redirects, directing US users to your US site, German users to your German site, as long as you don’t treat Googlebot differently than a user.

UPDATE: To clarify, John was talking specifically about US States, that it is fine to do geolocation redirects there. I’ll add more clarification below.

Here is John’s tweet:

New:

Back to the OLD version of this content:

So if you serve the US version to Google, since most of Googlebots come from the US, and you have content on your German version you want Google to index – make sure you give Google and users a way to access that content from the US.

Here is the video from 2013:

Here is the transcript:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: See the updates posted above. For country specific targeting, hreflang is the best way to go – sorry for not stating that earlier. Some time I feel like I can leave out the obvious here and keep articles short.