Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?

    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.

    Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?

    Technical SEO
    4
    6
    1135
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • FDFPres
      FDFPres last edited by

      Hi Mozzers,

      I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK.  Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down.

      They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service.

      Is there a way to stop google doing this?  I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do?  I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate.

      Thanks

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • irvingw
        irvingw last edited by

        You can add a couple of signals such as meta language tag globally

        and also in the footer make sure you have your address listed globally on the site, UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, whatever variations you can include are all hints to Google as to where your business is.

        Also, I agree with Robert, worry about the behavior of your qualified regional traffic  and not cutting off traffic from other regions just because of bounce rate and time on site. I'd personally prefer the traffic and visibility.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • RobertFisher
          RobertFisher last edited by

          Andrew,

          I can understand that you are concerned re the bounce rate, but you are likely over-concerned where you do not need to be. The reason is no site is losing ranking to bounce rate. Yes, there is a very low amount of debate on this, but I do not see it in the day to day and I look over a lot of sites. First, with your WMT settings as you have them, Google knows where your market is.

          So, to help you feel better, do this: Take a look at your non UK traffic. Is the high bounce rate coming from there? If so and if the algorithm takes it into account (it does not), then the algorithm also takes into account the bounce is from other than your proclaimed market. (The increase in BR).

          Worry about  your traffic in the UK - is it up or down? Is your time on site increasing or decreasing? How many page views are you getting over time? Have you gotten your content to a place where it is not the same descriptions and images as others selling the same furniture? Then, or before, how are you converting? Are your sales good? Increasing? Decreasing?

          Last question is this. Assume for whatever reason, that a crazy Yank goes to your site and sees a lovely divan he wishes to purchase and is willing to pay $1,000 to ship it to Texas... Would you let him?

          Best to you,

          Robert

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • zeepartner
            zeepartner @FDFPres last edited by

            if the problem is that those visitors from abroad are making your analytics data less valid, try to make a filtered profile where only visitors from the UK are included.

            But unfortunately, there is no "local type" robots.txt where you can block specific countries. you could ban certain IP ranges from accessing your site but i wouldn't recommend that...

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • FDFPres
              FDFPres @zeepartner last edited by

              Hi Philipp,

              Thanks for your response. As I said already I have put UK as my target in WMT (web master tools).

              The problem is that as soon as you arrive on my site it is pretty clearly UK only - and it is a furniture site, so who in their right mind would try to buy a 3 door wardrobe from over 1,000 miles away!  hence they leave almost immediately and my bounce is going up.

              zeepartner 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • zeepartner
                zeepartner last edited by

                Nope, you can't. But you can go to Webmaster Tools > Settings and set your geolocation to the UK. This won't stop your page being indexed in other countries, but might probably put the emphasis on UK results.

                But I don't see what the problem is with ranking abroad. In general, it doesn't hurt to get traffic, even if it's non-converting. Or do you get too many requests that won't lead to sales?

                FDFPres 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • nezona

                  Site Audit Tools Not Picking Up Content Nor Does Google Cache

                  Hi Guys, Got a site I am working with on the Wix platform. However site audit tools such as Screaming Frog, Ryte and even Moz's onpage crawler show the pages having no content, despite them having 200 words+. Fetching the site as Google clearly shows the rendered page with content, however when I look at the Google cached pages, they also show just blank pages. I have had issues with nofollow, noindex on here, but it shows the meta tags correct, just 0 content. What would you look to diagnose? I am guessing some rogue JS but why wasn't this picked up on the "fetch as Google".

                  Technical SEO | | nezona
                  0
                • eglove

                  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 | | eglove
                  0
                • melen

                  Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google

                  While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built.  Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed.  What is the best way to solve this problem?  I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?

                  Technical SEO | | melen
                  0
                • JohnHuynh

                  How to remove all sandbox test site link indexed by google?

                  When develop site, I have a test domain is sandbox.abc.com, this site contents are same as abc.com. But, now I search site:sandbox.abc.com and aware of content duplicate with main site abc.com My question is how to remove all this link from goolge. p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages. Thanks,

                  Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh
                  0
                • lemonz

                  How does Google Crawl Multi-Regional Sites?

                  I've been reading up on this on Webmaster Tools but just wanted to see if anyone could explain it a bit better. I have a website which is going live soon which is going to be set up to redirect to a localised URL based on the IP address i.e. NZ IP ranges will go to .co.nz, Aus IP addresses would go to .com.au and then USA or other non-specified IP addresses will go to the .com address. There is a single CMS installation for the website. Does this impact the way in which Google is able to search the site? Will all domains be crawled or just one? Any help would be great - thanks!

                  Technical SEO | | lemonz
                  0
                • AdrianBanu

                  Google rankings dropped dramatically after 24 hrs of hosting suspension

                  Hi, One of my websites ( http://www.traveldestinationsearch.com/ ) dropped most of its Google rankings after 24 hours of hosting suspension (from April 26 until April 27, 2012). The hosting company suspended my website after exceeding the bandwidth limit: there was no unusual activity on my website, it just exceeded its bandwidth limit by 20-30MB for the previous month. Anyway, the website is back online since April 27 but the problem is that, following these 24 hrs of no service, I see a dramatic decrease of my website's Google rankings for its main keywords. Even today, April 29, I can't find my website anywhere in the first 100 results for most of its targeted keywords. Before the suspension, the website ranked #1 for its main keyword and somewhere in the first 2-3 pages of Google search results for other two main keywords. My question is: is it the hosting suspension the reason for the Google ranking drop, and (assuming this is a temporary problem) when do you think I should expect my website to regain the rankings it had before the hosting suspension? Thanks for your support. Regards, Adrian

                  Technical SEO | | AdrianBanu
                  0
                • askotzko

                  Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?

                  I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.

                  Technical SEO | | askotzko
                  0
                • Weerdboil

                  Delete old site but redirect domain to a new domain and site

                  I just have a quick query and I have a feeling about what the answer is so just wanted to see what you guys thought... Basically I am working on a client site. This client has a few other websites that are divisions of their company. However these divisions/websites are no longer used. They are wanting to delete the websites but redirect the domains to their name main website. They believe this will pass on SEO benefits as these old division sites are old and have a good PR and history. I'm unsure for DEFINITE, which way is correct?

                  Technical SEO | | Weerdboil
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.