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Will Banning Certain Countries from Website Hurt SEO?
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.
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14 Replies
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Won’t hurt, and will definitely cut down on spam.
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Don’t block Mountain View California.
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Yeah I need the answer for this too.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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– 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. -
It certainly will in those countries
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Same. Once a guy send me a link to a youtube video talking about “Leftist Propaganda”
I am not even American ~.~
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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.
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No it won’t affect your SEO, if you ban some countries.
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Do you already have Captcha on your contact form? That’s solved my similar problems in the past
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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.
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Set a different email address for contact box for those countries
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