Does blocking foreign country IP traffic to site, hurt my SEO / US Google rankings?
-
I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors. 99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US. But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account. I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others.
But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this. I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly. However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site? Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches.
At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.
-
Honestly, there could be a very real world impact on your SERPs without you understanding it. I suggest not blocking all traffic from foreign countries.
Let's take this scenario as an example:
I have an ecommerce website that only sells to the United States. I really only care about the US traffic, since that is where my sales can come from. However, many of my inbound site links seem to be coming from Outside US traffic. This outside US traffic cannot buy from me, in fact, they cannot buy many of the products I sell because they are not available in their country.
Even so, when investigating my link profile, I notice that some users are getting the products I sell from somewhere and then blogging about how they love the product. They include a link back to my site since they know I sell the product.
Now, it's true that most traffic from that referral source will not convert to paid users. But, the links they provide are helping me in the SERPs, which brings in the qualified traffic that converts to sales.
In regards to the bounce rate =: You're not actually decreasing the bounce rate. Instead, you've identified the accurate segment of users to be measuring bounce rate from. In your Google Analytics, you should filter out the foreign traffic so that you're only measuring the correct segment of traffic that is important to you.
Now you have the best of both worlds - your reports show the accurate target segment and its metrics, as well as, any benefit that comes from the foreign traffic and link building.
-
I doubt blocking countries can have any negative effect on your SEO. Like in your case our company's customers are located only in US. We have blocked many foreign countries for exactly the same reasons you name and never had any negative effects on our SEO work due to the IP blocks. It's more...you may actually see a decrease in your website's bounce rates what is supposed to be good for your ranks.
-
I suggest not to block foreign traffic.
-
You do not know why someone might be searching from a foreign country.
-
Foreign traffic may help you identify key content areas for optimization, curation, opportunities, ect
-
Your site may provide value to foreign visitors in some way that you don't yet understand and removing all traffic could have a negative impact. For example: Foreign visitors cite your content and routinely link back to it (helps you in the SERPs).
If you're seeing many bot attempts on your admin, change its login address. That is a good first measure to preventing brute force attacks.
You can also use a plugin to limit the login attempts. If a bot comes and tries to login it will be prevented from logging in after X attempts.
Use a service like Cloudflare for additional security. Cloudflare is a free CDN provider that will give you an additional layer of security for your site. It has a list of known ip abusers and can filter those out from reaching your website.
-
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
-
Big problems with site traffic
Hello! I have big problems with website promotion. It's been 7 months and the attendance on the site is 1-5 people a day. I do not understand the reason. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? Site: www.azartlist.com Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bobic1 -
Web domain hurt seo?
does having the "web" prefix in the domain name, such as in web.pennies.com/copper hurt SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh1230 -
Are This Site's Backlinks Hurting Us?
Google WMT reports more than 198,000 backlinks to our site (www.audiobooksonline.com) from http://dilandau.eu/? We have never been notified by Google of any penalty, malware notification... but continue to struggle to get our page 1 Google ranking back since Panda. Could these backlinks be hurting our Google ranking? Should I implement a disavow rule for http://dilandau.eu/?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
How to perform Local SEO for sites like Angies List/Task Rabbit or Craigslist
I have a new SEO client that has a business model similar to Criagslist and Angies List or Task Rabbit, Where they offer local based services nationwide. My first thought was Local link building and citation building etc. But the issue is they are a purely online service company and they don't have a phyiscal address in every city/state they will be offering their services in. What is the best course of action for providing SEO services for this type of business model. I am pretty much at a stand still on how to rank them locally for the areas they provide services in. it's a business model that involves local businesses and customers looking for services from those local businesses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VITALBGS0 -
Improvement in rankings then site dissapears from SERPS?
Yesterday I saw significant improvements in rankings and the first page resulapp for several keywords appeared to have changed and included my site. Today the results appear to have reverted back and my site is nowhere to be seen. At least before I was in the top 100 but now I'm nowhere?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Site Indexed by Google but not Bing or Yahoo
Hi, I have a site that is indexed (and ranking very well) in Google, but when I do a "site:www.domain.com" search in Bing and Yahoo it is not showing up. The team that purchased the domain a while back has no idea if it was indexed by Bing or Yahoo at the time of purchase. Just wondering if there is anything that might be preventing it from being indexed? Also, Im going to submit an index request, are there any other things I can do to get it picked up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Different Google result for same keyword in different countries
Why does Google display different results in each country for the same keyword and with the same language? how can I take advantage of this to position my website in an specific country? In this case de domain is always a ."com" domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abellojuan0 -
Does Google Use Security Seals As A Trust/Ranking Signal
There are quite a few secuirty seals/site safety tools by some big antivirus/trust companies Mcaffe site secuirty, verisign etc. Does Google, or any other big search engines use these as a trust/ranking signal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster0