In short, you're right that search engines don't typically read or store cookies. However this shouldn't in itself cause problems for you.
You haven't said which, but you're using either the user's IP address or browser language setting to determine which regional page to redirect to. Presumably, there's also a default region which is used if your conditions aren't met. You then set a cookie so the site "remembers" where to send a repeat visitor.
Most search engines crawl from a single geographic location and don't send
Accept-Language HTTP headers, so can't necessarily "see" how these conditional redirects work. As a result, we need to ensure that all versions are crawlable and provide information (like
hreflang) which identifies the intended audiences for our content.
Google have recently tried to address this with "locale aware crawling", whereby they issue
Accept-Language headers and crawl from multiple, geographically diverse IP addresses. However, we don't know much more detail than that, so we can't make any safe assumptions about how this works in practice.
- Ensure that search engines can fully access all regional pages (i.e., crawlable links between them)
hreflang – this is currently supported by Google and Yandex
lang attribute of
<html> with ISO language or language-country pairs to indicate target for other search engines (Bing, etc.), e.g.,