Does country blocking affect SEO?

Question

I was getting frequent attack on my website from overseas countries when it started becoming popular in SEO. As my business is totally based in Australia, I thought it would be better to block all countries except Australia which doesn't bring any value to my business.

Now my biggest concern is what will be the impact in my SEO?

As per my understanding, it can affect on my traffic. But that was just around 30%. Almost 70% traffic i am getting is from Australia.

Are there any other factors which may bring negative effect in my SEO?

Answer 1

The main Google bot is visiting your site with a California IP address- there are some 'localized' versions but they do not always crawl your site with the same frequency/debt. Check google support site

For this reason Blocking US ip's could be risky. You cannot simply allow access to the bot and block all other US traffic as that would be against Google policy (cloaking).

Blocking other countries shouldn't be much of a problem. That said - don't think that blocking countries is the best strategy to defend yourself against attacks.

Answer 2

Here's another opinion from a different perspective.

Blocking can affect SEO, but you should think about this stuff:

How about blocking or filtering visitors automatically based on their IP address? When considering to block website visitors by IP it’s important to first evaluate the reliability of the IP address(es). The accuracy of an IP list is over 99.5% on a country level and 80% on a city level. The smaller the location, the less reliable the IP address.

The benefit of blocking the country via IP address would not only clean up analytical data, but also ensure sales funnel to be more efficient and provide a more accurate picture of real prospects in all systems.

Just to put in another perspective...

let's say 20% of your trafic is from China where you don't sell anything. What benefits do you have from that?

So... it's a bit tricky, but blocking is efficient to statistics, and you can do a better data analysis based on your 'real' customers.

Banning the country from your web will cut down the number of unsolicited calls, emails and web form requests. It will also give you much more accurate picture of how our website was performing within your own target market and service area.

Answer 3

Ref: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en

Check This section Geo-distributed crawling

when Googlebot appears to come from a certain country, treat it like you would treat any other user from that country. This means that if you block USA-based users from accessing your content, but allow visitors from Australia to see it, your server should block a Googlebot that appears to be coming from the USA, but allow access to a Googlebot that appears to come from Australia.

Googlebot uses well-established IP addresses that appear to come from the United States. With geo-distributed crawling, Googlebot can now use IP addresses that appear to come from other countries, such as Australia.

Note: This list is not complete and likely to change over time.