Despite owning my .com domain name for almost twenty years, a new Indian TV show with the same name as my domain is entering its second season, and I can't figure out how to mitigate the damage.
Almost 30% of traffic is coming from India. The primary target market for my business for the last 35 years has primarily been from North America which counts for only 33% of my traffic.
I'm not even sure the full extent of the repercussions. But when I put my business name and India into Google my site came up before I could find the correct site for the TV show.
We are also getting a lot of facebook likes from India, and we are even being left reviews on Facebook with no comments, that are clearly not from ur customers. With only one exception my customers leave me 5 stars, but this show only gets 3 or 4 from its viewers, and it brings my average down.
My site gets really busy when the show airs, slowing down legitimate site traffic.
My host, Cloudways suggested country blocking by .htaccess, but I have learned that would take 6000 lines to block India. I looked into CloudFlare and country blocking is only available on their Enterprise plans, and we are a small family business serving our community under the same name for 35 years.
What affordable solution can I implement to stop or minimize the damage to our site and its perception by Google and Facebook from all this mistaken foreign traffic?
Thanks for all suggestions.
doing its job
. Google wants to return relevant search results, but regardless people searching for the TV show are not getting a relevant result, and my customers have trouble finding me. People just type the domain into the address bar, so google thinks my site is of interest to people from India, but it is not, so they leave, inflating my bounce rate. Also I mentioned reviews not likes. – Linda Wilson Wall Jun 20 '16 at 21:31