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.
Blocking certain countries via IP address location
-
We are a US based company that ships only to US and Canada. We've had two issues arise recently from foreign countries (Russia namely) that caused us to block access to our site from anyone attempting to interact with our store from outside of the US and Canada.
1. The first issue we encountered were fraudulent orders originating from Russia (using stolen card data) and then shipping to a US based International shipping aggregator.
2. The second issue was a consistent flow of Russian based "new customer" entries.
My question to the MOZ community is this: are their any unintended consequences, from an SEO perspective, to blocking the viewing of our store from certain countries.
-
Both answers above are correct and great ones.
From a strategical point of view, formally blocking russian IPs does not have any SEO effect in your case, because - as a business - you don't even need an SEO strategy for the Russian market.
-
Fully agree with Peter, very easy to bypass IP blocking these days, there are some sophisticated systems that can still detect but mostly outside the range of us mere mortals!
If you block a particular country from crawling your website it is pretty certain you will not rank in that country (which I guess isn't a problem anyway) but I suspect this would only have a very limited (if any) impact on your rankings in other countries.
We have had a similar issue, here are a couple of ideas.
1. When someone places an order use a secondary method of validation.
2. With the new customer entries/registrations make sure you have a good captcha, most of this sort of thing tends to be from bots. A captcha Will often fix that problem.
-
Blocking IPs on geolocation can be dangerous. But you can use MaxMind GeoIP database:
https://github.com/maxmind/geoip-api-php
or you also can implemente GeoIP in "add to cart" or "new user" as additional check. So when user is outside of US/CA you can require them to fill captcha or just ignore their requests.Now from bot point of view - if bot visit with US IP and with UK (example) IP they will see same pages. Just within UK they can't create new user or adding to cart. HTML code will be 100% same.
PS: I forgot... VPN or Proxies are cheap these days. I have few EC2 instances with everything just for mine own needs. Bad Guys also can use them so think twice about possible "protection". Note the quotes.
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
-
Adding Schema and No index tags via GTM
If we were to deploy schema and noindex tags to our website via Google tag manager, would these tags be viewed and respected by other search engines?
Technical SEO | | GregLB0 -
Google Search console says 'sitemap is blocked by robots?
Google Search console is telling me "Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt." I don't understand why my sitemap is being blocked? My robots.txt look like this: User-Agent: *
Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian
Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap_index.xml It's a WordPress site, with Yoast SEO installed. Is anyone else having this issue with Google Search console? Does anyone know how I can fix this issue?1 -
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 | | eglove0 -
Blocked URL parameters can still be crawled and indexed by google?
Hy guys, I have two questions and one might be a dumb question but there it goes. I just want to be sure that I understand: IF I tell webmaster tools to ignore an URL Parameter, will google still index and rank my url? IS it ok if I don't append in the url structure the brand filter?, will I still rank for that brand? Thanks, PS: ok 3 questions :)...
Technical SEO | | catalinmoraru0 -
Temporarily suspend Googlebot without blocking users
We'll soon be launching a redesign, on a new platform, migrating millions of pages to new URLs. How can I tell Google (and other crawlers) to temporarily (a day or two) ignore my site? We're hoping to buy ourselves a small bit of time to verify redirects and live functionality before allowing Google to crawl and index the new architecture. GWT's recommendation is to 503 all pages - including robots.txt, but that also makes the site invisible to real site visitors, resulting in significant business loss. Bad answer. I've heard some recommendations to disallow all user agents in robots.txt. Any answer that puts the millions of pages we already have indexed at risk is also a bad answer. Thanks
Technical SEO | | lzhao0 -
Should I block robots from URLs containing query strings?
I'm about to block off all URLs that have a query string using robots.txt. They're mostly URLs with coremetrics tags and other referrer info. I figured that search engines don't need to see these as they're always better off with the original URL. Might there be any downside to this that I need to consider? Appreciate your help / experiences on this one. Thanks Jenni
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0 -
Site disappearing from search for a certain keyword
I was wondering if someone has encountered the same problem as me. I was doing some changes on the frontpage of one of my clients' website, especially some redirections, and my site has disappeared from Google for the main keyword on the page. So, if I look for my page on Google, instead of seeing my page first, I no longer see my page, at all. All I've done was a 301 redirection from index.html to the domain name. Now, I changed everything back to how it was before. More precisely, I've done that 2 weeks ago. But, no change in Google. I checked Bing and Yahoo, my site appears first when I search for that specific keyword. Any ideas how long will it take for Google to see that I am not doing anything wrong with redirections? Or any idea at all?
Technical SEO | | webmasterles0 -
How Can I Block Archive Pages in Blogger when I am not using classic/default template
Hi, I am trying to block all the archive pages of my blog as Google is indexing them. This could lead to duplicate content issue. I am not using default blogger theme or classic theme and therefore, I cannot use this code therein: Please suggest me how I can instruct Google not to index archive pages of my blog? Looking for quick response.
Technical SEO | | SoftzSolutions0