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 -
Website Domain Redirection- Rebranding Issues
I have a website domain redirection query At the moment because of rebranding and domain changes I havehttp://www.physioinqnepean.com.au redirecting to http://www.nepeanphysiohydro.com.au/.http://www.nepeanphysiohydro.com.au/ is the primary domain because at the time I wanted to appease any SEO ramifications that might’ve occurred if I had the new domain at the time “http://www.physioinqnepean.com.au” as the primary domain.Unfortunately, my client now wants to rebrand AGAIN with the new website domain being “http://www.physioinqpenrith.com.au”.I wanted to gauge what would be the best SEO practice in relation to what domain should be the “Primary domain"?
Local SEO | | JD261 -
Ideas on competitors website jumping so quickly?
Aloha Moz community! I've been chipping away on my site and have been happy to see progress on getting to the first page for some searches I'd like to rank for. That being said and during my time doing this I noticed a fellow photographer jump to the first page out of what seems like nowhere! http://emilyhelen.com/ It left me scratching my head trying to figure out where and how they're site jumped up to the front so fast and has been holding strong since then. Do you guys have any ideas or ways I could replicate that? Much appreciated as always guys! Warmest aloha, Jon Gibb
Local SEO | | Trey30 -
Searchmetrics Google ranking factors study says content gaining while links losing in importance ? Any View About this Post.
I am very Curious about it anyone please update about this http://searchengineland.com/searchmetrics-google-ranking-factors-study-says-content-gaining-links-losing-importance-265431
Local SEO | | MTPixels0 -
Website pages for different cities
HI, Is it ok to have pages on my website that are specifically targeted for one town? Does Google frown on this? is there any thing I should know about doing this, like, does it hurt my seo efforts in anyway? I would be making each page as resourceful as possible to the reader., by Including unique content etc Thanks in advance:)
Local SEO | | MissThumann0 -
Duplicate content across a number of websites.
We have a client who has approximately 25 retail sites (mini department stores) selling in general the same merchandise ranges - some stores carry all the ranges (brands) while others have fewer due to space restrictions. Each destination is different has its own branding and unique selling point which needs to be reflected. The client wants us to build individual websites for each location as they want to promote each location individually. I know that the search engines don't penalise duplicate content, but the core of each website is going to be essentially the same. My concern is there is no way you could write 25 different pages about the same Colony Candle range! Any ideas suggestions would be much appreciated - a one site option would not work as the client wants individual website and due to the different branding, USP and the fact they want to market them individually I would agree with them. Thanks Fraser
Local SEO | | fraserhannah0 -
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?
Local SEO | | Bear.Group0 -
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