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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.

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    Using a GEOIP service such as MaxMIND to redirect doesn't take hardly any bit of code. The Likes, regardless of where they come from should been seen as a positive. Sadly, with the rankings part, there's not much you can do, because obviously more people are talking about that show than your site... therefore Google is doing a good job, Domain and content age do not trump trends. To beat them for the same keyword you will need to get people buzzing about your content. – Simon Hayter♦ Jun 20 '16 at 21:02
  • Thanks for your comments. I looked at MaxMind but wasn't sure how to implement that with Magento. I'll look at it again. – Linda Wilson Wall Jun 20 '16 at 21:16
  • I don't understand your other comments though. Google isn't 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
  • You have my empathy - that is for sure! This is the first time I have heard anything like this. I will think on this for a bit, however, right now, I cannot think of anything. I hope you get an answer. Cheers!! – closetnoc Jun 21 '16 at 1:04
  • If a TV show called Spotted Dick becomes massive in India, then that search becomes relevant in other parts of the world not just in India. TV show's are generally shown in many countries. Bollywood, Hindi and other foreign films or TV shows are absolute MASSIVE in America, Asia and Europe, Shows or films don't need to be made in America to be world-wide hits... we are living in a multi-culture world with immigration everywhere... To assume that Google is not doing a very good job because the show isn't English, or made in the same country is incorrect. – Simon Hayter♦ Jun 21 '16 at 14:22
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What I can suggest is to adjust your title tags and meta description tags as well as H1 tags to make user's understand that your site is NOT the TV show.

For example, if your site is a site about building homes and both the TV show and your site is called ABC, then I suggest adding meat to the tags.

So instead of having the title as "ABC" or "ABC inc", make it "ABC house building of america" and change the meta description from "This is ABC" to something like "This is ABC, the #1 american place online for new house building". Even make H1 informative. Instead of the H1 title "Welcome to ABC", use "ABC, the #1 american house building site".

You may also want to specify the lang parameter in the HTML tag to define the language of the site to help crawlers understand it. In my site I use:

<html lang="en">

to denote english language. In your case, "en-us" might be better for American English.

If you do all that, then we can only pray search engines will scan the whole document instead of just the domain name before ranking it.

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    This is already been done. I also don't feel this is an SEO question. As I said before, the traffic coming to my site from India are primarily coming from people typing ShowName.com, where ShowName stands for the title of the show. Also the problems caused by this are further reaching than just search engine rankings. For example cost of server upgrade, lost business due to traffic spikes, reviews, as well as my aspects of my business activities with Google and Facebook, and it becomes an uncontrollable variable when trying to analyze stats, for future decision making. – Linda Wilson Wall Jun 20 '16 at 23:28

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