Geo Pulse #45 — QA-ing your geo-redirect logic before launch

Geo Pulse #45 — QA-ing your geo-redirect logic before launch
Theme of the week: test the redirect from inside each GEO, not from your desk.

A tester's checklist for IP-based routing:

→ List every redirect rule and its trigger (country code, language header, currency) in a sheet before touching code.
→ Verify the GeoIP database version — MaxMind GeoLite2 updates weekly; a stale copy mis-routes whole ranges.
→ Test each target country through a residential proxy or the BrowserStack/local-VPN combo, not just one datacenter exit.
→ Confirm you set a manual override (a country switcher), because ~3–5% of users land on the wrong version regardless.
→ Check that bots aren't redirected before Googlebot crawls — serve the canonical version to crawlers or use hreflang instead of hard redirects.
→ Log mismatches for a week and review the worst offenders.

Credit: MaxMind GeoIP2 docs and Google's guidance against locale-based hard redirects for crawlers.