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.
How to NOT appear in Google results in other countries?
-
I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries?
The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%)
Thanks!
-
I tend to agree with James in terms of bounce rate. Google tries to segment the most relevant result by country, so a low bouncerate outside your target market hopefully wouldn't hurt you much.
That said, you can specify a target country in Google Webmaster Tools. Instructions are here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en
Using this setting doesn't ensure your website wont appear in foreign results, but it does give a "hint" to Google that the content isn't targeted for that region.
Hope this helps!
Cyrus
-
Hi James,
Our items are large, and shipping to other countries is just way too expensive. So no plans to ever go international.
My understanding is that a low bounce rate (and other stats that relate to a good visitor experience) often result in higher Google rankings. So we really do want to know if there is some way to shut off the flow of foreign visitors...
-
Do they cause you any other issue than effecting your bounce rate?
If not, then I would not try to stop them visiting your website, but just segment the bounce rates as you have done above.
The reason I say this is three fold:
1/. Trying to prevent SE's not displaying you to certain countries etc, could be fraught with problems and you could well end up damaging the SERP's in your key countries.2/. 'Country by IP' is not an exact science - and you may exclude some people who are located in your target countries.
3/. If you ever expand into the countries you want to currently block, would it not be nice to already have traffic from that market? What about customers who are from your target countries but searching while they are on holiday abroad?
Hope that helps
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
-
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Google Cache Is Blank for Text-only
Hi, I'm doing some SEO for www.suprafootwear.com, and for some reason when I go to text-only in google cache, nothing shows up. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:suprafootwear.com&es_sm=91&strip=1 That seems to be the case for all of the different pages on the site, but the content is still appearing on the serp. I have never seen this before, and I'm not sure what's happening. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bigwavew0 -
My website (non-adult) is not appearing in Google search results when i have safe search settings on. How can i fix this?
Hi, I have this issue where my website does not appear in Google search results when i have the safe search settings on. If i turn the safe search settings off, my site appears no problem. I'm guessing Google is categorizing my website as adult, which it definitely is not. Has anyone had this issue before? Or does anyone know how to resolve this issue? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
Google and Product Description Tabs
How does Google process a product page with description tabs? For example, lets say the product page has a tab for Overview, Specifications, What's In the Box and so on. Wouldn't that content be better served in one main product description tab with the tab names used as (htags) or highlighted paragraph separators? Or, does all that content get crawled as a single page regardless of the tabs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
How to find all indexed pages in Google?
Hi, We have an ecommerce site with around 4000 real pages. But our index count is at 47,000 pages in Google Webmaster Tools. How can I get a list of all pages indexed of our domain? trying to locate the duplicate content. Doing a "site:www.mydomain.com" only returns up to 676 results... Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120 -
How long is the google sandbox these days?
Hello, I'm putting up a new site for the first time in a while. How long is the Google Sandbox these days, and what has changed about it. Before it was 6 months to 1 year long. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Why do SERP Results ( Rankings ) differ from country to country ?
Hi, I have been doing seo for this client based in Sri lanka for almost 8 months now. Since we started SEO we had set up geographic target setting to UK through google webmaster tools. At the moment Site is completely ranking higher on google uk & other countries except Sri Lanka . On Google.lk site doesn't even come within 1st 5 pages for keywords which are ranked on1st page in other countries ? What do you think about this ? How does it happen ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pyxle0