Will Banning Certain Countries from Website Hurt SEO?

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  • December 5, 2020 at 1:15 am #13430
    seohelper
    Keymaster

    Hey Guys,

    I’m a small business owner and have a locally optimized website. All my clients are within a 5 mile radius of me.

    Recently I’ve been getting an insane amount of spam mail from India and Pakistan- mostly people just using my website’s contact form. At least 1-2 visitors a day from those countries that open the site, leave a message or call me, and bounce.

    I know I can ban certain countries from my website, but I’m wondering if that would affect SEO. Does Google care if a website is set to US+Canada only? I could also maybe make a separate homepage just for india/pakistan with a fake contact form and phone number on it..

    Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

    December 5, 2020 at 1:38 am #13432
    sum_yungai

    Won’t hurt, and will definitely cut down on spam.

    December 5, 2020 at 1:48 am #13431
    jeffp301

    Don’t block Mountain View California.

    December 5, 2020 at 1:55 am #13435
    marshdurden

    Yeah I need the answer for this too.

    December 5, 2020 at 2:22 am #13433
    sarweshparajuli

    Well, in my view you could rather add a ReCaptcha and also use the honeypot technique to reduce spam significantly.

    I believe the spam mails from India and Pakistan are generated by bots, and using a honeypot, the bots cannot complete the form.

    Doing that is more efficient than banning certain countries afaik.

    December 5, 2020 at 2:26 am #13436
    mybunnygoboom

    You will need to manually whitelist the Google and Bing bots, also if you’re running Google ads you may get a “page not accessible” error bc of a crawler being unable to connect. This has been an issue with one of my client’s sites that we have set up with country-specific security.

    December 5, 2020 at 3:22 am #13437
    sleepyHype

    If they are spamming your contact box then they are probably trying to brute force hack your site too.

    I recommend adding security to your site.

    December 5, 2020 at 3:50 am #13438
    whdbf

    – Use captcha for contact form.
    – Yes you can ban if you don’t target those countries. Use cloudflare. Set a seperate page informing we don’t service your country.
    – also set target country to your’s inside google search console.

    December 5, 2020 at 4:04 am #13434
    daherdevil

    It certainly will in those countries

    December 5, 2020 at 4:28 am #13439
    HorrorNo6753

    Same. Once a guy send me a link to a youtube video talking about “Leftist Propaganda”

    I am not even American ~.~

    December 5, 2020 at 10:20 am #13440
    mantas8

    I have blocked some countries which I don’t want. Spammy comments and irrelevant audience is kinda annoying problem for me as well.

    Now even search engine bot, who comes from Nigeria or Pakistan will be blocked- that’s great, coz I even don’t want my website to rank on these countries.

    December 5, 2020 at 11:50 am #13441
    MilesWeb

    No it won’t affect your SEO, if you ban some countries.

    December 5, 2020 at 3:08 pm #13442
    Pink_Skink

    Do you already have Captcha on your contact form? That’s solved my similar problems in the past

    December 5, 2020 at 5:44 pm #13443
    DataMedics

    I wouldn’t ban them from the site entirely, as that might inadvertently block some bots that actually want to help your site get indexed somewhere. Perhaps a more targeted approach would be better. I know I have a chat widget that was getting spammed on a site. Had a programmer write me some custom code so now that widget only appears to people in the USA and Canada.

    December 6, 2020 at 1:07 am #13444
    snopeal45

    Set a different email address for contact box for those countries

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