Can site blocked for US visitors rank well internationally?
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Because of regulatory reasons, a stock trading site needs to be blocked to United States visitors
Since most of google datacenters seem to be located in the US, can this site rank well in the other countries where does business despite being blocked in the US? Do U.S. Google data centers influence only US rankings?
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In theory yes it shouldn't make a difference to your international rankings. It's just making sure Googlebot (which does come from the US) is able to crawl your website.
For every other country, because it's for legal reason I would suggest just block them, but you need Googlebot (and other bots like Roger) to crawl your website.
Instead of completely blocking traffic from the US, would it be possible (and I don't know the legal requirements) to detect if the visitor is from the US and show them a different page? "Sorry, we can't help you but here are some great resources" and link to some American sites. Hopefully, Google would still crawl your website as would be able to see your sitemap.
Sometimes if it's a legal requirement you have to do it, even though it may potentially harm your rankings (I have a similar issue with a finance client, where some of the legal requirements go against Google / UX best practices but they have to be done to trade).
What I would do is once you have blocked US visitors, is monitor Search Console and your server logs to make sure Googlebot is still crawling your website as frequently and as deeply.
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