Should I block Ukraine, China and Russian Federation for better SEO?
-
My statistics show that a large percentage of hits to my site are from Ukraine, China and the Russian Federation. Now I know for a fact that most of my demographic is from the US with a bit of Western Europe thrown in. So obviously these are spam bots. Also I have many linked pages with the .ru extension that are spammy. Should I block Ukraine, China and the Russian Federation in my htaccess? I would think bounce rate is very high with spam bots so would that improve my SEO? Then of course there is the extremely annoying buttons-for-website.com and semalt-semalt.com!
-
with regards to rankings? nothing but if you do entertain leads from these countries so they might not be able to access your site.
-
Moosa,
Can you talk about the risks of doing this? The downside?
Thanks.
-
Blocking them will not only help you decrease your bounce rate but less chances of getting your website hacked.
Hope this helps!
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
-
SEO Effect of inserting No indexed Contents in normal Pages (Nextgen Gallery)
Hello Dear Community, I'm running a photography website and have a question about the indexability of "No indexed Content" inserted on indexable pages. Background : I read everywhere that best practice is to "no index" all useless pages with few content, what I did with Yoast plugin : I no indexed all my nextgen galleries and "ngg_tags" since they create single pages for every photo, tags or slideshow. I did the same for all my porfolio-posts, price lists, testimonials and so on... Nevertheless, I inserted these galleries and portfolios on SEO optimized page for my target keywords. + Nextgen plugin automatically adds these images in the page sitemap. My idea is to have only my Seo optimized page showing in Google and not the others. Problem: I've been checking the results in Google Search Console, filtering by images : I discovered that most of the images featured in these Masonry galleries are not showing in google, and actually almost all the images indexed are the Wordpress from media gallery. I double checked with Screaming Frog, and the software doesn"t see images on these pages. My question is: Is the low indexablilty of these contents are related to the No indexation of the original contents ??? Does somebody has experienced the same issue that these contents doesn't show on Google ? in advance many thanks for your help
Reporting & Analytics | | TristanAventure0 -
Best way to block spambots in htaccess
I would like to block Russian Federation, China and Ukraine spam as well as semalt and buttonsforwebsite. I have come up with the following code, what do you think? For the countries: BLOCK COUNTRY DOMAINS RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .(ru|cn|ua)(/|$) [NC]
Reporting & Analytics | | ijb
RewriteRule .* - [F] And for buttons-for-website.com and semalt-semalt.com: BLOCK REFERERS RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (semalt|buttons) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F] or should it be: BLOCK USER AGENTS RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (semalt|buttons) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F] Could I add (semalt|buttons|o-o-6-o-o|bestwebsitesawards|humanorightswatch) or is that too many?0 -
Block IP from analytics
How can I block an ip from analytics? basically so I do not see test orders from a certain ip in the sales performance section? Thanks for any help.
Reporting & Analytics | | tdigital0 -
SEO Moz Errors
We have SEO Moz Errors and warnings showing up, yet we have cleaned them
Reporting & Analytics | | RNK
up. The same errors were showing up in Google's Webmaster tools but after we corrected them they do not show up as crawl errors in Webmaster tools.
Why is SEO Moz different and why does it continue to show corrections already made.0 -
800,000 pages blocked by robots...
We made some mods to our robots.txt file. Added in many php and html pages that should not have been indexed. Well, not sure what happened or if there was some type of dynamic conflict with our CMS and one of these pages, but in a few weeks we checked webmaster tools and to our great surprise and dismay, the number of blocked pages we had by robots.txt was up to about 800,000 pages out of the 900,000 or so we have indexed. 1. So, first question is, has anyone experienced this before? I removed the files from robots.txt and the number of blocked files has still been climbing. Changed the robots.txt file on the 27th. It is the 29th and the new robots.txt file has been downloaded, but the blocked pages count has been rising in spite of it. 2. I understand that even if a page is blocked by robots.txt, it still shows up in the index, but does anyone know how the blocked page affects the ranking? i.e. while it might still show up even though it has been blocked will google show it at a lower rank because it was blocked by robots.txt? Our current robots.txt just says: User-agent: *
Reporting & Analytics | | TheCraig
Disallow: Sitemap: oursitemap Any thoughts? Thanks! Craig0 -
SEO & CPC
So...I know Google secret sauce is just what secret but on a couple occasions I've seen a Phenomenon occur that I'd like some help understanding. I work at a fairly new eCommerce sit called www.savvisdirect.com. We have the normal new site desires...more traffic. Most of our traffic is coming from CPC but we were seeing about a 33% increase in organic wk over wk, until...we drastically cut our CPC spend on Google for a wk. Then organic dropped by about 1/3'rd. Nothing else changed, that's it. I know Google says that CPC spend doesn't affect rankings but I've seen this phenomenon a couple time @ a couple different sites & I'm getting to the point where I just don't believe it. What's your perspective on this?
Reporting & Analytics | | RPD0 -
Any advice for better results for local search in the UK ?
Hi there, I have tried the tools here, and they are BRILLIANT but maybe to much for me. I just wondered if anyone in the UK had time to give me some advice. A lot of my customers are small businesses (mainly trades, like plumbers, builders etc etc), and I am trying to find best practices for getting them more quality traffic amidst a lot of competition. One customer I am working with currently has 50+ competitiors for his small plumbing business that are within 5 miles of him and have an effective web prescence. In those circumstances (take it as read that I have killed myself creating quality content that I am proud of for this client), does anyone have any killer advice for me that could make my sites more effective ? If anyone does have the time I am more than willing to PM the URL I am working with at the moment. Thanks for your time..
Reporting & Analytics | | nicklemonpromotions0 -
Can I find results for my SEO rankings over an extended period of time?
I was hoping to put a report together chronicling my SEO performance over the last 2 months and couldn't find a place to see prior information.
Reporting & Analytics | | AppNeta0