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.
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
-
I want to load my ecommerce site xml via CDN
Hello Experts. My ecommerce site - abcd.com
Technical SEO | | micey123
My ecommrece site sitemap abcd.com/sitemap.xml
My subdomain - xyz.abcd.com ( this is blank page but status is 200 which runs from cdn) My ecommerce site sitemap abcd.com/sitemap.xml contains only 1 link of subdomain sitemap- xyz.abcd.com/sitemap.xml
And this sitemap- xyz.abcd.com/sitemap.xml contains all category and product links of abcd.com So my query is :- Above configuration is okay? In search console I will add new property - xyz.abcd.com. and add sitemap xyz.abcd.com/sitemap.xml So Google will able to give errors for my website abcd.com Purpose - I want to run my xml sitemap from cdn that's why i have created subdomain like xyz.abcd.com Hope you understood my query. Thanks!0 -
Where did the "Location" go, on Google SERP?
In order to emulate different locations, I've always done a Google query, then used the "Location" button under "Search Tools" at the top of the SERP to define my preferred location. It seems to have disappeared in the past few days? Anyone know where it went, or if it's gone forever? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | measurableROI0 -
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 -
Should I block Map pages with robots.txt?
Hello, I have a website that was started in 1999. On the website I have map pages for each of the offices listed on my site, for which there are about 120. Each of the 120 maps is in a whole separate html page. There is no content in the page other than the map. I know all of the offices love having the map pages so I don't want to remove the pages. So, my question is would these pages with no real content be hurting the rankings of the other pages on our site? Therefore, should I block the pages with my robots.txt? Would I also have to remove these pages (in webmaster tools?) from Google for blocking by robots.txt to really work? I appreciate your feedback, thanks!
Technical SEO | | imaginex0 -
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO?
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) by adding the code they give have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO? Anyone know? Thanks! ~Brett
Technical SEO | | BBuck0 -
Google insists robots.txt is blocking... but it isn't.
I recently launched a new website. During development, I'd enabled the option in WordPress to prevent search engines from indexing the site. When the site went public (over 24 hours ago), I cleared that option. At that point, I added a specific robots.txt file that only disallowed a couple directories of files. You can view the robots.txt at http://photogeardeals.com/robots.txt Google (via Webmaster tools) is insisting that my robots.txt file contains a "Disallow: /" on line 2 and that it's preventing Google from indexing the site and preventing me from submitting a sitemap. These errors are showing both in the sitemap section of Webmaster tools as well as the Blocked URLs section. Bing's webmaster tools are able to read the site and sitemap just fine. Any idea why Google insists I'm disallowing everything even after telling it to re-fetch?
Technical SEO | | ahockley0 -
How should I structure a site with multiple addresses to optimize for local search??
Here's the setup: We have a website, www.laptopmd.com, and we're ranking quite well in our geographic target area. The site is chock-full of local keywords, has the address properly marked up, html5 and schema.org compliant, near the top of the page, etc. It's all working quite well, but we're looking to expand to two more locations, and we're terrified that adding more addresses and playing with our current set-up will wreak havoc with our local search results, which we quite frankly currently rock. My question is 1)when it comes time to doing sub-pages for the new locations, should we strip the location information from the main site and put up local pages for each location in subfolders? 1a) should we use subdomains instead of subfolders to keep Google from becoming confused? Should we consider simply starting identically branded pages for the individual locations and hope that exact-match location-based urls will make up for the hit for duplicate content and will overcome the difficulty of building a brand from multiple pages? I've tried to look for examples of businesses that have tried to do what we're doing, but all the advice has been about organic search, which i already have the answer to. I haven't been able to really find a good example of a small business with multiple locations AND good rankings for each location. Should this serve as a warning to me?
Technical SEO | | LMDNYC0