Does blocking traffic from a country via a firewall affect my ranking?
-
The main conversion point on my site is a contact form completion. Approximately a third of my conversions last year were from an international country we don't sell our services in, and all those conversions were attempts to sell us services. We are considering blocking the traffic to the site from that country. I'm trying to figure out if that will negatively affect my SEO rank here in the US before we proceed with that plan.
Does anyone have any experience with implementing this tactic?
-
Thank you, Peter. This is exactly what I was looking for.
-
I think that answers here can help you:
https://moz.com/community/q/blocking-certain-countries-via-ip-address-locationSince question is similar. Adding PHP code for geolocation checks (maxmind geoip) is just 2-3 lines of code. And you can ignore submissions from other countries.
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
-
Houston Printing Company Removed City from Main Page - Will Our Rankings Change?
We operate a full service printing and direct mail company located in Houston (www.catdi.com ). We have been in business for quite sometime and had enjoyed top tier position on page one for many years. However after revamping our website and main page it was determined that we used "Houston" way too often. Our keywords are ( Houston Printing , Printing in Houston)
Local SEO | | NEWCHOPPER
I suppose to the pros it looked and it seemed a little spammy with all the references to our city. But after the changed we have now dropped to mid - bottom of page two. Should we worried or does after sometime
will be move back up? I dont want to hastily change back but to our surprise those aren't really searched terms I would hate to see our positions and ranking fall because of this change. Thanks CATDI PRINTING0 -
Trying to rank homepage nationally and internal pages locally?
We are a finance brokerage in Australia and we operate in a specialist niche and in regional areas with low competition but we have identified KW's that are very profitable to us but seem to need different approach re strategy. We specialise in Agribusiness lending. We have been pretty scrappy in the past with our SEO as it has always been done by me, and as a startup, as everyone knows, the jack of all trades can help and hinder! To date, we have done a lot of Adwords (and KW research) so I have a fair idea of what keywords I am after. Some KW are low competition and extremely profitable to us. But there is a difference between them on who our competitor is and how difficult it would be to rank and which strategy to use. For example Agribusiness, used by all major banks, now they provide agribusiness, but only via their own products, as we are brokers we tend to receive a lot of new leads as we are brokers and we can compare all products and as agribusiness can be quite complex this is a major point of difference for us. So my strategy to rank for this KW would include a national approach as we provide advice in this space on a national scale, which has worked well via AdWords leads. But would like to move away from my sole reliance on AdWords. Then we move onto KW that we have also had some success on a national scale via Adwords but the metrics suggest is better from a local perspective (local regional town), i.e hobby farm loan, rural finance, even home loans (when there is no other local competitor in small town). As we have brokers in other regional towns this also opens up an opportunity to have either internal pages with lots of local signals (i.e NAP, Authority outbound links, local KW, social signals from local FB groups etc). But can a internal page compete against a competitors HP, for example I was going to set up mysite/Toowoomba.com.au internal page with info re that broker and lots of local points, or am I best to create another site, i.e brandname-Toowoomba.com.au (still linking from my contact us page for Toowoomba) and focus solely on local for this site (including internal pages to rank locally, i.e Toowoomba Home loans)? the extra benefit is I then create another asset if I was to sell the region as a franchise (another discussion) So, my question is, can I mix my strategies without any issues, or should I create separate sites?
Local SEO | | AgLend0 -
Country subdomain versus ccTLD?
Hi all, I have a client that is debating changing their URL from www.example.co.uk to uk.example.com. I'm searching around trying to find an argument as to why they shouldn't do this, but I can't find anything concrete. I know the difference between a subdomain and ccTLD, but the push back I'm getting is that it will be better to switch to uk.example.com because the subdomain is country specific. Personally, I think that is bull. Does anyone have a good argument to help back me up? (or prove me wrong!) Thanks, Virginia
Local SEO | | Virginia-Girtz1 -
Google Maps - ranking our head office over smaller offices
Hi, We have Google Maps listings for all of our offices but a small office often shows up instead of our head office. Is there any way to get head office showing instead? Thanks
Local SEO | | Houses0 -
How should i Get Max Traffic To my website
Hello Dear Moz friends, I am New to This Forum, I just Want to ask How should I get maximum traffic to My website??
Local SEO | | falguniwpi
As i Have done All The things Correct, But i am Not getting Good traffic To my website, Posted on Forums, regular facebook posting, G+, But Still i am Not Getting good visitors to my website. Please Suggest me some Good Traffic Generation Sources, Thank you0 -
How to promote a local SEO/Web design company via a blog (mainly blogging) and social media?
Hello, What is possible as far as promoting a local SEO and Web Design Company with a blog? I'm offering simple web design, both informational and product based, as well as SEO for existing informational and product-based companies here in Boise, Idaho. At first it won't be face to face so there's no local SEO. I honestly don't like to sell. I've done it for years and I'd like to spend my time blogging (mainly blogging), doing social media, and volunteering. How can I use this approach to get a beginning agency off the ground? Please don't tell me to go push my services. I'd like to get my company off the ground through avenues that have integrity to me. How do I do this? Feel free to include articles and videos in your response if appropriate. Thank you.
Local SEO | | BobGW0 -
Decline in rankings
Hello everyone, Our website has NOT yet ranked on page 1 for any of our keywords but something strange happened two days ago when we noticed that 7 of our Leeds keywords and 2 of our Manchester keywords were ranking between position 5 and 8 on ''page 1'' so we made a list of them. To make sure that we were not mistaken, we checked this at 3 different occasions over a period of 3 hrs and 2 of my colleagues witnessed this too. We were really overwhelmed as we were not expecting this rise at all. But we were shocked when we rechecked these rankings today and noticed that ALL these rankings have dropped from position 6-7 to 15-25 and this has happened for 9 keywords. There has been no Google message in the webmaster tool etc. Has someone ever noticed something similar. At the time of rise in rankings, we were spending huge money on PPC campaigns, could that be a reason why our organic rankings went really high??? I dont think there is a connection between organic and paid rankings but that is the only thing that I can think of really. Any advices will be highly appreciated Thanks in advance
Local SEO | | Imy840 -
All of our clients are showing an increase in traffic from Brazil?
Hello, I am concerned as all 30 of our clients show traffic coming from Brazil-and they are all locally-serving businesses. What's more, the visitors from Brazil is increasing in GA. It's looking more and more like our competitor is trying to thwart our good rankings by using some overseas IPs to mess with traffic. Is there anything I can do? There is no reason why any of our clients would be relevant to Brazil, as they serve only local clients. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Local SEO | | lfrazer0