Stop Google indexing entire website based on search location
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OK - bear with me...
We have a .co.uk website. However, we only want it indexing in the US Google and NOT the UK Google.
Is there a way of configuring this in Search Console /Webmaster tools?
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Hi Anthony,
There's unfortunately no setting in Google Webmaster Tools for this.
Your best bet is to use IP detection logic to either totally block (return an error status code and no content) or serve a simple "our content is not available in your country" error page to all requests from IP addresses in the UK.
You can do this by building your own reference database or using a service - there's also some freeware). (FYI: anyone on a proxy network can get around this.)
Google does use "locale-aware" crawling, including appearing to crawl from other countries than the US (most likely through a distributed computing network), and the UK is likely high on the priority list for that.
Google should pick up on this over time and stop including your pages in search results. But it may not be immediate.
Best,
Mike
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