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.
Does blocking foreign country IP traffic to site, hurt my SEO / US Google rankings?
-
I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors. 99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US. But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account. I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others.
But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this. I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly. However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site? Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches.
At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.
-
Honestly, there could be a very real world impact on your SERPs without you understanding it. I suggest not blocking all traffic from foreign countries.
Let's take this scenario as an example:
I have an ecommerce website that only sells to the United States. I really only care about the US traffic, since that is where my sales can come from. However, many of my inbound site links seem to be coming from Outside US traffic. This outside US traffic cannot buy from me, in fact, they cannot buy many of the products I sell because they are not available in their country.
Even so, when investigating my link profile, I notice that some users are getting the products I sell from somewhere and then blogging about how they love the product. They include a link back to my site since they know I sell the product.
Now, it's true that most traffic from that referral source will not convert to paid users. But, the links they provide are helping me in the SERPs, which brings in the qualified traffic that converts to sales.
In regards to the bounce rate =: You're not actually decreasing the bounce rate. Instead, you've identified the accurate segment of users to be measuring bounce rate from. In your Google Analytics, you should filter out the foreign traffic so that you're only measuring the correct segment of traffic that is important to you.
Now you have the best of both worlds - your reports show the accurate target segment and its metrics, as well as, any benefit that comes from the foreign traffic and link building.
-
I doubt blocking countries can have any negative effect on your SEO. Like in your case our company's customers are located only in US. We have blocked many foreign countries for exactly the same reasons you name and never had any negative effects on our SEO work due to the IP blocks. It's more...you may actually see a decrease in your website's bounce rates what is supposed to be good for your ranks.
-
I suggest not to block foreign traffic.
-
You do not know why someone might be searching from a foreign country.
-
Foreign traffic may help you identify key content areas for optimization, curation, opportunities, ect
-
Your site may provide value to foreign visitors in some way that you don't yet understand and removing all traffic could have a negative impact. For example: Foreign visitors cite your content and routinely link back to it (helps you in the SERPs).
If you're seeing many bot attempts on your admin, change its login address. That is a good first measure to preventing brute force attacks.
You can also use a plugin to limit the login attempts. If a bot comes and tries to login it will be prevented from logging in after X attempts.
Use a service like Cloudflare for additional security. Cloudflare is a free CDN provider that will give you an additional layer of security for your site. It has a list of known ip abusers and can filter those out from reaching your website.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
Home Page Disappears From Google - But Rest of Site Still Ranked
As title suggests we are running into a serious issue of the home page disapearing from Google search results whilst the rest of the site still remains. We search for it naturally cannot find a trace, then use a "site:" command in Google and still the home page does not come up. We go into web masters and inspect the home page and even Google states that the page is indexable. We then run the "Request Indexing" and the site comes back on Google. This is having a damaging affect and we would like to understand why this issue is happening. Please note this is not happening on just one of our sites but has happened to three which are all located on the same server. One of our brand which has the issue is: www.henweekends.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Will changing category URLs on site hurt SEO?
Hi Moz Community, We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it. Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise. We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu. So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced. My questions are: If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page? Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way? Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow? Thanks so much for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaraLP1 -
My site shows 503 error to Google bot, but can see the site fine. Not indexing in Google. Help
Hi, This site is not indexed on Google at all. http://www.thethreehorseshoespub.co.uk Looking into it, it seems to be giving a 503 error to the google bot. I can see the site I have checked source code Checked robots Did have a sitemap param. but removed it for testing GWMT is showing 'unreachable' if I submit a site map or fetch Any ideas on how to remove this error? Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Wrong country sites being shown in google
Hi, I am having some issues with country targeting of our sites. Just to give a brief background of our setup and web domains We use magento and have 7 connected ecommerce sites on that magento installation 1.www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK) - main site 2. www.tidy-books.com (US) - variations in copy but basically a duplicate of UK 3.www.tidy-books.it (Italy) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 4.www.tidy-books.fr (France) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 5.www.tidy-books.de (Germany) - fully translated by a native speaker - uits' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 6.www.tidy-books.com.au (Australia) - duplicate of UK 7.www.tidy-books.eu (rest of Europe) - duplicate of UK I’ve added the country and language href tags to all sites. We use cross domain canonical URLS I’ve targeted in the international targeting in Google webmaster the correct country where appropriate So we are getting number issues which are driving me crazy trying to work out why The major one is for example If you search with an Italian IP in google.it for our brand name Tidy Books the .com site is shown first then .co.uk and then all other sites followed on page 3 the correct site www.tidy-books.it The Italian site is most extreme example but the French and German site still appear below the .com site. This surely shouldn’t be the case? Again this problem happens with the co.uk and .com sites with when searching google.co.uk for our keywords the .com often comes up before the .co.uk so it seems we have are sites competing against each other which again can’t be right or good. The next problem lies in the errors we are getting on google webmaster on all sites is having no return tags in the international targeting section. Any advice or help would be very much appreciated. I’ve added some screen shots to help illustrate and happy to provide extra details. Thanks UK%20hreflang%20errors.png de%20search.png fr%20search.png it%20search.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tidybooks1 -
Ranking on google but not Bing?
Any reason why I could be ranking for Google but not Bing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Will changing Google Places address hurt rankings?
I have a client transferring ownership of their service business (photo booth rental). The current listed address will change, so my main concern is preserving the rankings during the transition. Should I change the Google Local listing to a new physical address, or change it to "serve a surrounding area"? It seems best to set as "serving a surrounding area", but I know Google is really weird about making local listing changes. I've seen and heard about countless listings falling completely off the map after being updated. Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Why am I not ranking in Google, but I am in Yahoo and Bing?
The website in question is: www.stbarthexclusives.com Our keywords are currently ranking for both Bing and Yahoo, but we're not appearing anywhere on Google. The website is being crawled successfully, but we still don't have any results. I hoping somebody can point me in the general right direction to fix/correct this problem. Additionally, there's a decent amount of "rel=canonical tags" on the website. If that helps your evaluation. Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Endora0 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0