Google Search Console verification problem after blocking countries

Question

I have recently blocked all countries except USA and Australia to access my web server as I was getting frequent attacks from many countries. My business is totally based in Australia and I don't expect customers from other countries.

But I got a weird issue, when I try to verify the site from Google Search Console it does not work. I thought the issue is related with country blocking and then I searched for google.com's server location and I found that it's located in Luxembourg.

Then I asked server team to unblock access for that country as well.

But I am still getting same error:

Verification failed for mydomain.com using the HTML file method (less than a minute ago). The connection to your server timed out.

I also get similar error in Google PageSpeed Tools.

Timeout while fetching the main resource. Ensure that the page loads in a browser and try again.

Do you have any idea what could be the problem?

I don't want to allow access from all countries, that just creates additional problem.

Answer 1

It happens because the Google server that is used by Google Webmaster Tools is not necessary located in Luxemburg because based on your research, the Google.com's server is there.

Google uses many servers around the world and it is almost impossible to know from which one you will be crawled every time.

Furthermore to your question, I really think is a very bad idea to block incoming connections from all countries except USA and Australia, for many and very important reasons.

Please consider to block incoming connections from particular ISPs or Datacenters after gathering enough data from your logs on the attacks you face on your server.

Even better analyze that data and for beginning create proper rules using IPTABLES and Fail2Ban in case your server runs on Linux.

In a few words build a security strategy for your server instead of rising walls against to almost everyone on the planet.

For your knowledge, start learning the basics of Layered Security strategy, a solution that requires advanced skills on server administration or use Cloudflare's Business Plan which is the easiest solution to work on, yet expensive if you have low or no budget for your server's security .