I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors.  99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US.  But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account.  I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others.

But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this.  I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly.  However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site?  Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches.

At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.

I researched the spelling and grammar thing, and you re correct, it turns out it is not something that Google looks at, although there is a correlation between writing quality and ranking, for obvious reasons.  Here's Cutts on the subject:

http://get.uk.com/page.php?article=1724&name=Better+Spelling+Equals+Better+Search+Results+%255BGOOGLE%255D

Thanks for your input.

"I would tend to agree with Chris though. Thinking about quality, engagement, and relevance will get you much more in the long term than just writing long articles that don't engage people."

There seems to be the assumption that if I write a long page, it won't be engaging.  That's in incorrect assumption.

One thing this is making me think about now too is this:  I think I should edit some of the commenter's writing.  I know Google marks down pages for misspelling and poor writing, however it is that they judge the writing. My commenters are of very low intelligence (but great ad clickers!), and their comments reflect that. I don't want to get marked down for that.

Appreciate the reply. But what you're saying isn't really supported by Moz and others' own research. (See this article, there are others.) It's proven that Google loves long article.  Obviously, a page needs all the other factors, such as is the page even good, are their social shares, etc, but all things being equal, a long page is better than a short page as far a ranking is concerned (conversion is a whole other topic).

b=But what I did get out of your response is that comments DO count, and that Google in fact likes to see comments. Can you explain exactly what you mean about "the fact that the page has visitor profiles that have commented on it?" When you say "visitor profiles" are you saying the name in the comment must link to a profile of a registered member, as opposed to a comment that was made by an unregistered user comment and therefore does not link to any user profile?

As Moz and others have proven, long articles help ranking, linking and sharing.  My question is, do the comments at the end of an article count in the word count as Google counts it.

Back at this, still looking.  Any help please?

You said, "build a content site with a store, a content site with affiliate links instead of ads" Yes, I'm thinking I'd have many times greater pages with content versus product pages, and the product pages would have long, original content on them. You also said, "affiliate links instead of ads" So, having both ads and affiliate links indicates that I'm not that serious I suppose, since "real" ecommerce sites don't run ads as well? Interesting, this is unrelated to the site I asked the question about, but I have a site now on precious metals, which is high-content, low amount of adsense. I was thinking I might choose one metals broker affiliate link (like a Goldbank or someone) and place it in the sidebar. Would that small change screw up my rankings? And, "a site with a shopping cart operated by the affiliate program" I'm not clear on this. Why is that?

I know Google has slammed affiliate sites hard. But affiliate marketing can be a real business and had an idea for one, but I would like to know if ALL affiliate sites are looked at as evil in Google's eyes, or if it's just those with thin and duplicate content in the product descriptions.

I know they want brands to come up ahead of affiliates of that brand, and that makes sense.  If I sold Acme Widgets products, Acme Widgets itself should come up ahead of my site.  But what if the site sold widgets in general, with the term widgets not a branded keyword? If all product descriptions are unique and well-written content, on a site that is  high quality, would it still be downgraded by Google just because there are affilate links in it?

I guess overall the question could be boiled down to, are affiliate sites hit because they have horrible content or because they have links to affiliate programs in them?

What do you think Google thinks of a site that has redirects in it, I mean overall. Do they perhaps think something shady is going on?  I've got another site that I have to redirect about a dozen pages (and it's not a big site), as I migrate a poorly designed site to a better one.  The redirects will be from URL like .../sample-page.php to .../sample-page.  What will Google think of that?

And if some pages I've redirected don't have links to them, and I'm only concerned with the search engines changing the indexed pages, how long do I need to keep the redirects active?

I have a set of three pages that are subpages of a parent. The structure is as follows:

mysite.com/directory/personal-widgets

mysite.com/directory/commercial-widgets

mysite.com/directory/widgets-services

The partent page name "directory" really isn't working for where I want these pages to evolve. So I want to change it to "guides"

In a world without worrying about google, I would simply change the parent page to guides, so they look like this, and be done with it:

mysite.com/guides/personal-widgets

But, the obvious problem is that I have external links to the page now. And the pages have a nice PR. And they also have Facebook page Likes and I don't know if I'll lose those.

I know that if I should do this I should redirect the pages to the new pages of course.

My question is:

Will redirecting the old URL to the new URL with a 301 cause anything negative to happen that I might not be expecting?  Does Google dislike Redirects for any reason, or understand they are sometimes necessary?