Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?

    Technical SEO
    4
    6
    1096
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • FDFPres
      FDFPres last edited by

      Hi Mozzers,

      I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK.  Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down.

      They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service.

      Is there a way to stop google doing this?  I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do?  I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate.

      Thanks

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • irvingw
        irvingw last edited by

        You can add a couple of signals such as meta language tag globally

        and also in the footer make sure you have your address listed globally on the site, UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, whatever variations you can include are all hints to Google as to where your business is.

        Also, I agree with Robert, worry about the behavior of your qualified regional traffic  and not cutting off traffic from other regions just because of bounce rate and time on site. I'd personally prefer the traffic and visibility.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • RobertFisher
          RobertFisher last edited by

          Andrew,

          I can understand that you are concerned re the bounce rate, but you are likely over-concerned where you do not need to be. The reason is no site is losing ranking to bounce rate. Yes, there is a very low amount of debate on this, but I do not see it in the day to day and I look over a lot of sites. First, with your WMT settings as you have them, Google knows where your market is.

          So, to help you feel better, do this: Take a look at your non UK traffic. Is the high bounce rate coming from there? If so and if the algorithm takes it into account (it does not), then the algorithm also takes into account the bounce is from other than your proclaimed market. (The increase in BR).

          Worry about  your traffic in the UK - is it up or down? Is your time on site increasing or decreasing? How many page views are you getting over time? Have you gotten your content to a place where it is not the same descriptions and images as others selling the same furniture? Then, or before, how are you converting? Are your sales good? Increasing? Decreasing?

          Last question is this. Assume for whatever reason, that a crazy Yank goes to your site and sees a lovely divan he wishes to purchase and is willing to pay $1,000 to ship it to Texas... Would you let him?

          Best to you,

          Robert

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • zeepartner
            zeepartner @FDFPres last edited by

            if the problem is that those visitors from abroad are making your analytics data less valid, try to make a filtered profile where only visitors from the UK are included.

            But unfortunately, there is no "local type" robots.txt where you can block specific countries. you could ban certain IP ranges from accessing your site but i wouldn't recommend that...

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • FDFPres
              FDFPres @zeepartner last edited by

              Hi Philipp,

              Thanks for your response. As I said already I have put UK as my target in WMT (web master tools).

              The problem is that as soon as you arrive on my site it is pretty clearly UK only - and it is a furniture site, so who in their right mind would try to buy a 3 door wardrobe from over 1,000 miles away!  hence they leave almost immediately and my bounce is going up.

              zeepartner 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • zeepartner
                zeepartner last edited by

                Nope, you can't. But you can go to Webmaster Tools > Settings and set your geolocation to the UK. This won't stop your page being indexed in other countries, but might probably put the emphasis on UK results.

                But I don't see what the problem is with ranking abroad. In general, it doesn't hurt to get traffic, even if it's non-converting. Or do you get too many requests that won't lead to sales?

                FDFPres 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                Browse Questions

                Explore more categories

                • Moz Tools

                  Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                • SEO Tactics

                  Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                • Community

                  Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                • Digital Marketing

                  Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                • Research & Trends

                  Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                • Support

                  Connect on product support and feature requests.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • Mike555

                  Google image search filter tabs and how to rank on them

                  I have noticed Google image search has included suggestion tabs (e.g,. design, nature... when searching background) on the top of the image search.
                  Are there specific meta tags I can add into my images so that my images will show up on each tab?
                  Do those filters just show content based on image keywords or something else? IRme7gQ

                  Technical SEO | | Mike555
                  0
                • eglove

                  Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?

                  I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/

                  Technical SEO | | eglove
                  0
                • JohnHuynh

                  How to remove all sandbox test site link indexed by google?

                  When develop site, I have a test domain is sandbox.abc.com, this site contents are same as abc.com. But, now I search site:sandbox.abc.com and aware of content duplicate with main site abc.com My question is how to remove all this link from goolge. p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages. Thanks,

                  Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh
                  0
                • EcomLkwd

                  Huge ranking difference between google and bing

                  I am trying to rank for the keyword "trash bags" I did  a lot of on-page optimization and link building. We started ranking #2 on bing and yahoo but google seems to be stubbornly fluctuating between being as high as 20 and as low as 45 and even dropped our rankings for a couple of weeks. Is there any need for concern if google is acting so different from bing/yahoo?

                  Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd
                  0
                • sparts

                  Why is my site jumping around in google search ?

                  Hi I've been trying to get my page up in google results and I was wondering why the constant fluctuation. For example, on one day the pages is nr. 26, the next day it's nr. 65 then jumps back on say 30 and then in a few more days it's going back to 50. What's the logic behind that ? Thanks Cezar

                  Technical SEO | | sparts
                  1
                • Romana

                  Why are Google search results different if you are log'd into Google or not?

                  I get different results when I'm log'd into my Google account associated with my website than if I'm not.  The same country is occurring. So how can I rely on the google results I'm seeing? For instance my site is page 1 with the improvements I made based on SEOMOZ if I'm log'd in.  Yet I'm not on the first 25 pages if I'm not logged in.

                  Technical SEO | | Romana
                  0
                • Ant-808

                  How long will Google take to stop crawling an old URL once it has been 301 redirected

                  I need to do a clean-up old urls that have been redirected in sitemap and was wondering about this.

                  Technical SEO | | Ant-808
                  0
                • FastLearner

                  Does google use the wayback machine to determine the age of a site?

                  I have a site that I had removed from the wayback machine because I didn't want old versions to show. However I noticed that in many seo tools the site now always shows a domain age of zero instead of 6 years ago when I registered it. My question is what do the actual search engines use to determine age when they factor it into the ranking algorithm? By having it removed from the wayback machine, does that make the search engines think the site is brand new? Thanks

                  Technical SEO | | FastLearner
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.