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.
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
-
How do I "undo" or remove a Google Search Console change of address?
I have a client that set a change of address in Google Search Console where they informed Google that their preferred domain was a subdomain, and now they want Google to also consider their base domain (without the change of address). How do I get the change of address in Google search console removed?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng0 -
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 -
Blocked URL parameters can still be crawled and indexed by google?
Hy guys, I have two questions and one might be a dumb question but there it goes. I just want to be sure that I understand: IF I tell webmaster tools to ignore an URL Parameter, will google still index and rank my url? IS it ok if I don't append in the url structure the brand filter?, will I still rank for that brand? Thanks, PS: ok 3 questions :)...
Technical SEO | | catalinmoraru0 -
Block Domain in robots.txt
Hi. We had some URLs that were indexed in Google from a www1-subdomain. We have now disabled the URLs (returning a 404 - for other reasons we cannot do a redirect from www1 to www) and blocked via robots.txt. But the amount of indexed pages keeps increasing (for 2 weeks now). Unfortunately, I cannot install Webmaster Tools for this subdomain to tell Google to back off... Any ideas why this could be and whether it's normal? I can send you more domain infos by personal message if you want to have a look at it.
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Should I block robots from URLs containing query strings?
I'm about to block off all URLs that have a query string using robots.txt. They're mostly URLs with coremetrics tags and other referrer info. I figured that search engines don't need to see these as they're always better off with the original URL. Might there be any downside to this that I need to consider? Appreciate your help / experiences on this one. Thanks Jenni
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0 -
Should H1 tags include location?
I have an IT services company that is based out of Denver. In the past I always used Denver in the H1 tag like this "Denver IT Support & Managed Services" or "Denver Data Center Solutions" I know that H tags are not that important any more but I still want to put them on each page. My question is in a post panda world do those look too spammy? Should I not include Denver on each page. I have about 25 service pages that I was going to do this for. Each page will be different because of the service but I was going to include Denver on each page. On that same note how, I normally put never in the title for each page. Should I rethink this also? Obvisouly I want to rank on Denver and the service. Any help on this would be great. Thanks
Technical SEO | | ZiaTG0 -
Site disappearing from search for a certain keyword
I was wondering if someone has encountered the same problem as me. I was doing some changes on the frontpage of one of my clients' website, especially some redirections, and my site has disappeared from Google for the main keyword on the page. So, if I look for my page on Google, instead of seeing my page first, I no longer see my page, at all. All I've done was a 301 redirection from index.html to the domain name. Now, I changed everything back to how it was before. More precisely, I've done that 2 weeks ago. But, no change in Google. I checked Bing and Yahoo, my site appears first when I search for that specific keyword. Any ideas how long will it take for Google to see that I am not doing anything wrong with redirections? Or any idea at all?
Technical SEO | | webmasterles0 -
Websites on same c class IP address
If two websites are on the same c class IP address, what does it mean ? Does two websites belong to the same company ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050