How to remove countries viewing my website
-
Hi All,
I operate from the UK only. How can I exclude select countries from viewing both my organic website and Google Adwords listing.
Organic Website
Are the any free online services that give you a simple click + download/view script to cut & paste into a .htaccess file.Google Adwords
Ditto as above with the exception to paste the IP list into Campaign | Setting Tab | Advanced settings - IP exclusionsThanks Mark
-
All,
Thank you for the quality information.
I was not aware that 'out of country - bad influences' would not affect your UK site performance.I agree with your logic that untold ip addresses would slow down site speed thus affect Google rankings.
Thanks Mark
-
Gregory is on the money with adwords, and I agree with organic, its not worth the effort. Also ips address are not always right, I have seen some ip ranges for UK visitors show as Ireland and some Ip ranges for Ireland visitors showing as Austria!!
-
Gregory summed it well, my only add on to it in setting when adjusting the geographical settings also adjust the intent. So if you have a German in Berlin searching for "my service in Newcastle" they won't be served the ad if they out of the actual area, if you don't want any non UK PPC visitors.
-
Hi Mark,
I asked a similar question here and on a few other SEO forums a few weeks ago. Here is what I learned...
PPC (Bing Ads and Google Adwords) is very easy to fix. Just go into the settings for your campaigns and only target the countries you want your ads to show in. Later if you find that your results are poor in certain cities or states or provinces, you can even exclude them. Targeting your ads this way works very well and is very easy to do.
Limiting Organic results is not worth the effort. Though you can add a huge list of excluded IP's to your htaccess, you then slow down your site because of the computing effort needed to check each new visitor. What is worth the effort, is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and declare your targeted country or region. What I was told by a number of different responders was that doing so means that Google will not count poor site performance outside your targeted country against you.
For example, my US targeted site has a generic Bounce Rate of 60%. When I dig deeper I find that traffic from countries like Phillipines and India have a bounce rate pushing 80%, but that traffic from the US has a bounce rate of only about 45%. Since I have declared the US as my targeted country, Google is supposedly not counting poor performance from other countries against my site. I have set up "Segments" in my Google Analytics to only show US visitors, and that really helps get a realistic uncontaminated overview of how my true customers are interacting with the site.
-
Hi Mark,
I haven't actually done this myself, but I have clients who have. You could always try something like this to build the list for you: http://blockacountry.com/
This might also be worth having a read over http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1299746/how-to-allow-access-only-within-country
I don't know of anything specifically for Adwords though.
-Andy
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
-
What is the best structured data for my website
We have 10:branches for our agency where we are looking to attract local businesses to use our marketing services, should each landing page have structured data for ‘local business’? Any advice would be helpful
Local SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
2 Websites Targeting Similar Keywords
One of my clients is set on setting up another website targeting some of the keywords/services on the main site. One of the services they offer gets traffic from natural search and also Adwords but doesn't convert well for this service. For other services (which are often utilized at the same time by the customers) the site converts well. My client feels that... "people are not converting on the main site because they click on the page and realise that we are a wider company. From this they probably work out that we don’t actually produce Green Widgets and we just buy them in. Therefore we will be more expensive than a company who does manufacture Green Widgets (although there are only a few in the country who actually make them)." The new site "...will have more of a manufacturer and specialist feel. There will be a small mention of other services. People visiting will think we are specialists and that we make them, whereas at the moment they may feel that they are just being cross sold a product. We have also noticed that we are not being found earlier enough and we are contacted to do other work only to find that another company is providing the Green Widgets." I did something similar back in the day, but here we ran a local website and a national website covering the same products. We tried hard not to duplicate the keywords we targeted minimising this as much as possible. I don't think we cared much about the local site as the national one went crazy busy. In essence, my client wants to do the following: Main Site...
Local SEO | | GrouchyKids
Blue Widgets Bristol
Red Widgets Bristol
Green Widgets Bristol (This would be retained) New Site...
The new site would focus on Green Widgets In time the new site would include content for...
Green Widgets
Green Widgets Bristol (As per the main site)
Green Widgets Cardiff It would also make mention of Blue Widgets and Red Widgets as possible addons. The new site would be at the same address but have its own companies house registration, emails and phone numbers. My feeling is that we should take an above-board, risk-free approach and remove the Green Widgets service from the main site to ensure it doesn't upset Google. In other words go out of our way to minimise targeting of similar/same keywords across the 2 sites. My client strongly disagrees showing evidence of others using similar tactics (we have had the EMD debate as well). I am also concerned about Google Places and how this might be viewed here. Opinions please, also any idea of what if any action Google would take if we push forwards?0 -
Feedback to what to offer to my clients on my SEO website - local to Boise ID
Hi, I'm targeting Boise, Idaho and building an SEO consulting website. Right now I only offer 3 things because that's what I have experience in: 1. On-site SEO 2. Content Audit 3. Start a company from scratch. Ecommerce, Service, or Informational I know #3 involves all SEO, so it will be challenging, but 1-3 is what I've been doing for 10 years. What feedback do you have as far as 1-3 being my 3 offers, and is $200/hour fair? I work off quotes by estimating my time at $200/hour. Thanks.
Local SEO | | BobGW1 -
Click to view phone number
Well hello there! We run a local directory site for a specific vertical and use several thousand call tracking numbers (one per listing) to track calls to the local business and report on those metrics (number of calls, appointment set, etc). We are familiar with dynamic phone number insertion to be able to track phone calls back to the type of traffic or campaign sending it. If we wanted to implement this, it would require an exorbitant amount of call tracking numbers as we already start out with several thousand numbers to begin with. We are toying with the idea to hide the phone number in the directory listing and require the user to click to show the full phone number. We know this is an additional action required by the user, but we assume that this would then help us see the folks who are more serious about calling the number of the local business. We could then use that click metric to then tie out all the goals within GA to look at how effective a given medium is and even look at what content is sending traffic that clicks on the phone number. Two areas for comments: Any input on others who use this metric? Any input on if anyone thinks this is a good/bad metric? Anyone have a better idea/technique? Do you think that the search engines would see this technique as a negative? If so, why or why not? Thanks!
Local SEO | | HeaHea0 -
Dynamic websites & SEO
Hello Mozzers, I would love some advise from some seasoned SEO people PLEASE. The company I work for are replacing their static website for a new dynamic website which affectedly serves blocks of generic content based on the users activity. Currently we rank really well, especially for local long tail terms - however I am very unsure and apprehensive as to how this new approach will affect our rankings. Can Google index content pulled together on the "fly"? Can anyone recommend an article, website, white paper - explaining how to limit the change to SEO? Kind regards Ben
Local SEO | | Bendall0 -
What is The Best Way to Rank in Multiple Countries?
Hi, I have a client that would like to rank in google.ie as well as .co.uk and in the middle east and possibly other parts of Europe. What is the best way to go about this? Would a new domain for each country be best and hosted in that specific country or is there a way to do this with one site? Bearing in mind that SEO will need to be done to rank in each country. Many Thanks.
Local SEO | | WSIDW0 -
Content Across International Websites
I am wondering if anyone could clear up some questions I have regarding international SEO and how to treat the content placed on there. I have recently launched several websites for a product internationally, each with the correct country domain name etc and I have also followed the guidelines provided by webmaster tools on internationalisation. All the websites are targeted towards English speaking countries and I have rewritten most of the of the content on there to suite the English style of the targeted country. This is being said however I am finding mixed bags of information on what to do in treating large chunks of potential duplicate content. For example my main .com website which has been running several years (and is targeted to the UK) has a lot of well written articles on there which are popular with the visitors. I am needing to find out if duplicating these articles onto the international versions of the websites, without rewriting them, would have a detrimental effect on SEO between all the sites. I have done a site search for each domain name to see if they are cropping up in other local Google versions (e.g .ca site in Google.com.au etc) and they are not. Does this mean Google is localised to its results regarding duplicate content or is it treated at the root level? Any information to point me in the right direction would be a big help.
Local SEO | | Rj-Media0 -
Removing Sub Domain & Improving Page Performance
Hello Moz folks, This question is about my main website: www.web3.ca
Local SEO | | Web3Marketing87
(run on joomla) I just noticed a very strange occurrence - when I add ANY subdomain to the home page, it still resolves to the home page. example: test3.web3.ca Can this be bad for SEO, and is there a way to eliminate this? Second Question: Do you think there are two many outgoing links on the home page of Web3? Could reducing the number of links improve the home page's performance & rank? Thanks
Anton0