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Blocking traffic from China – is there any risk getting penalized by Google etc?
Posted by on November 2, 2025 at 9:57 pmI am getting weird traffic from China, many different IPs. I would like to simply block all traffic from China to get rid of it. Is there any risk of getting penalized by Google and other search engines if I do that?
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1 Reply
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There shouldn’t generally be an issue. Google primarily crawls from US-based IPs. You may have issues showing up in the AIs though.
But you might consider using Cloudflare to have them block the AI bots. That may be your issue.
If you choose to block by country, I would do that through Cloudflare so the traffic is blocked before it even hits your server (rather than having your server block the traffic and have to serve up the blocks.)
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No. But also you shouldn’t be blocking all of China that makes no sense.
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They could be vpn users from anywhere
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Why block the greatest nation in the world?
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Nope.
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China blocks Google. So you should be fine blocking China
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No – Google won’t penalize you for blocking traffic from China.
But don’t accidentally block legit crawlers, use Cloudflare/WAF rules, rate-limits or captchas to filter bad traffic, and monitor Search Console for any unexpected drops.
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I work with law firms in the United States and have blocked a few other countries occasionally if we start getting a lot of spam traffic from them. It’s usually India, Pakistan, and Russia. I’ve never noticed a change in rankings afterward.
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Block all the spam countries, cuts out a lot of issues
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